Re: [xwiki-users] XWiki scripting for end user (not Groovy)

I first discovered XWiki two years ago and it seemed a bit raw, I was looking for a corporate wiki and the features proposed fit my needs but the interface and user experience wasn't what I was looking for. I came back to XWiki a few weeks ago after having tested TWiki for quite a long time and Deki Wiki for a shorter period. I was quite amazed by the huge step forward XWiki had done. The company I work for (Andalusian Ministry of Economic and Finance) is looking for a corporate wiki for IT and possibly non-IT personal. We have strong technical requisite: Java platform and Oracle database since it would ease administration a lot. XWiki is nearly the only competitor in the field. As for feedback: first things first, XWiki is a really nice piece of software with very promising possibilities. Technically speaking it is hard to peep, it certainly is a nice playground for developers. As for user experience, all the wiki features one might need are offered but I think there is room for improvements on the ease of use. For what I could test, not a lot really, I find the WYSIWYG editor inconsistent, and I think it's a big problem, if you edit a page and then saves it various times without changing anything it sometimes comes up with new line breaks or style markups that often break formats or tables. It's annoying and will repel new wiki users. I saw you're working on a new editor based on GWT, I hope that will help. To add my two cents to the reflexion I would prevent the addition of "markups" (everything between {}) from the editor. Just limit it to strict wiki syntax, nothing else. TWiki works like this and it's great, you always have a consistency between wiki edition and WYSIWYG edition, this is not the case in XWiki (according to my experience). Some users prefer wiki syntax, some WYSIWYG, what happens if they edit the same page? For example, you have a font size option in the editor, it really should be removed by default, it inserts {style} markups that messes up the wiki syntax (since there is no wiki syntax for font size). Moreover this option is quite useless since font size doesn't matter with css and font size control in the browser, what matters is the relative font size not the absolute value. You use headers and special css styles to emphasize text, not fixed size. The Deki Wiki way of doing things is different: they don't have wiki syntax, you always have the editor and the pages are stored in xml. It's a nice solution too. As I said before some features are too complicated, forms and template for example. TWiki and Deki Wiki have dead simple mechanisms to make templates. I think it's because they're slightly different. XWiki templates allows you to create custom page structure while TWiki and Deki templates allows you to create pages with pre-filled content to complete. How can I do this in XWiki? Forms seems too complicated, I didn't try hard I must say, but I don't think they're wiki friendly. You have to manage dev jargon like classes and properties. TWiki forms work with a regular table in a wiki page. It's really easy to use and there's no need to learn anything new. To resume I think XWiki is a bit to dev oriented, it should care more about the end user and provide him with dead simple mechanisms for features that just work. Less fancy tech stuff and more pragmatic end user experience. Wiki adoption comes because wiki is simple and fun, not because you can embed Java code directly in pages (although the dev guys here love it). *I repeat, this is a first impression, I might be totally wrong.*