6 Apr
2017
6 Apr
'17
2:58 a.m.
Hi Vincent,
As long as I have your ear, here is my largest frustration from a user perspective.
The current notifications email are not very useful from a non-technical user perspective.
Even as a technical person who looks at diffs all day long, the emails are very difficult
to parse. There are two changes that need to happen:
1. The ability to receive a “pretty” email whenever a comment is added to a watched page.
***this is the most critical
2. The ability to receive a daily “pretty” email of all changes to all pages.
Underlying assumptions:
1. The consumers of these emails are normal humans who are not trained at reading diffs.
2. Comments should be handled as real-time communication. If someone comments on a page I
want to know now. Currently, I do not receive a notification on a comment, I have to dig
that fact out of the diff of the daily page change email.
If you want I can turn this into a JIRA ticket. I have also been considering digging into
the extension system to see if I could fix it myself.
Thanks for listening!
Be well,
Craig
On Apr 5, 2017, at 2:47 PM, Craig Wright
<crw+xwiki(a)crw.xyz> wrote:
Waiting for it! ;)
I swear the tab with that page has been open in my browser for like three weeks. I’ll
make it happen eventually! Probably right after I deploy that docker container...
In terms of frustrations, as a self-hoster, it is mostly around what I would call
“assumptions.” As a php/python guy who has largely (but not completely) managed to avoid
Java, there is a lot about running Java web platforms I just don’t know. The docs are
great in that there are some clear guidelines as to “best standard configuration” which
helped me pick a AWS machine (m3.small) and whatnot, but there is a lot of assumed
knowledge too. The nginx+ssl example is a good one; since Apache+Tomcat seems to have some
built-in conveniences, I had to figure out what headers needed to be forwarded / rewritten
to get it to work with nginx. And it’s not like nginx is some niche reverse-proxy; it is
pretty popular.
Snippets is another good example. Once you figure out “oh these run in wiki pages,” it
makes sense. Until you figure that out, you are tearing your hair out trying to understand
what the hell you are supposed to do. Again, the assumption is the user has at least that
basic knowledge but it is not actually in the docs anywhere that comes up in a google
search.
Overall though, I can’t really complain. As I get more experienced with the software and
understand the docs layout a bit better, these are all things I could change or improve
with a little time.
Thanks!
Craig
> On Mar 31, 2017, at 12:27 PM, Vincent Massol <vincent(a)massol.net> wrote:
>
> Hi Craig,
>
>> On 31 Mar 2017, at 21:08, Craig Wright <crw+xwiki(a)crw.xyz> wrote:
>>
>> XWiki is a very large, feature-rich product. While there are a lot of docs, they
have clearly grown organically over time. Areas of the docs like Snippets assume a
familiarity with the system that is not available to learn from the docs site itself.
That’s the bad news; the good news is that the docs are mostly editable by users and so it
is a place where us newbies can contribute. In fact I owe them an update on how to install
XWiki+nginx+SSL. :)
>
Waiting for it! ;)
>
>> I have had a good number of frustrations getting things running,
>
> We’re keen to improve XWiki constantly and I’d love to know what those are to see
whether we’re working on them or to add them to our todo in case they’re not.
>
>> but I have to say compared to other wiki systems I’ve used, you can’t beat the
features at the price. Things may get much easier with the containerized deployment, I
haven’t tried that yet.
>
> Let me know how the xwiki docker image works for you. I’m sure there are plenty of
features to add but would be great to know what users are looking for.
>
> Thanks
> -Vincent
>
>> Be well,
>> Craig
>>
>>
>>> On Mar 30, 2017, at 3:20 PM, Douglas Landau <DouglasL(a)westmarine.com>
wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>> I’ve never used this code but shouldn’t it execute in a wiki page?
>>>
>>> Thanks Vincent. I finally figured out from Craig Wright's comment
("FOR THOSE NEW TO XWIKI") that a)there is such a thing [as a code snippet that
runs in a page] and that this is one of them. Being completely unaware of the existence
of snippets, I would never have guessed that this was one.
>>>
>>> I followed step 1:
>>> Step 1: Switch to Filesystem attachments.
>>> I followed step 2:
>>> Step 2: Add a new directory to your backup routine.
>>> I read step 3:
>>> Step 3: Copy attachments from database to filesystem.
>>> Now you are ready to copy the data over from your database to the filesystem.
It is prudent to leave the attachments in the database since in most situations the
attachment data is not bothersome just sitting in the database (The only risk of
attachments left in the database is that they will bloat the size of the database files).
As such, this script contains no facility to delete entries from the database.
>>> If anything goes wrong in this function, it will fail with an error message
and you should get the stack trace, keep it to confuse and humiliate the developer with.
No harm should be done since this only loads from the database and only saves to the
filesystem.
>>>
>>> I read step 4:
>>> Step 4: Make sure everything is working.
>>> Check to make sure your attachments are still there, if an attachment is
broken, ... <snip>
>>>
>>> I felt quite sure that how to run the thing should be in step 3; 2 is too
soon, and 4 is too late. But how? Nowhere in the text does it actually say how to run
the thing!!! So I googled looking for other's comments on forums, etc. I YUM
installed Groovy and tried running it on the commandline. I removed the leading and
trailing lines ("[[grovy]]") which caused errors. I got class not found errors.
I read step 3 again. I started reading the details of CLASSPATH and
/bin/build-classpath. With reluctance and just a little resentment. It was an extwemewy
fwustwating expewience.
>>>
>>> That said, I realize it the mailing list is for questions, not complaints,
and so apologize to all for this complaint, and will take it and my other such
observations to Jira and log them as bugs.
>>>
>>> dkl
>>>
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>>
>