On Mar 21, 2008, at 9:36 AM, Guillaume Lerouge wrote:
Hi Mike,
How would one add applications to XWiki Workspaces?
I don't mean adding objects in pages, but rather the left side
navigation panel that has Home, Wiki, Photos, Files.
There's no easy way to do it as of now (though it can be done with a
little work). I'll try to write a tutorial on how to do it in the
near future, to be added on
workspaces.xwiki.org .
I also think that it's not the goal of Workspaces to be a generic
purpose wiki. This is for XE. Thus we need to be very careful about
the features that we expose in XWS since its goal is to be dumb simple!
My take is that users should only be able to add the applications that
we've packaged for them (i.e. that are in the distribution). Of course
an admin can probably do whatever he wants since it's an XE under the
hood ;)
WDYT?
I agree that, unlike XE, XWS is a product that is not intended to be a
basis for product developments/custom developments; and as you say, it is
and should stay dumb simple. But, I also believe that their is one thing
we should at some point expose to developers: application development for
spaces. For me this won't make XWS more complex, it will just give the
opportunity for those who want/need, to empower their spaces with business
apps/other apps. (and why not for us having contributed apps we can share
on
code.xwiki.org).
As for the status on XWS application development now, it is not that
complex as Guillaume let it sound :) Spaces applications are described
with an object of XAppClasses.XWikiApplicationClass class from XWiki's
application manager plugin, which indicate the documents to copy and to
link in the space, when installing the application in the space.
(Note that this is somehow a deviant usage of the application manager,
since those fields are meant to be used for a cross-wiki installation, not
a local instantiation of the application. In the future, we should expand
the application descriptor of the application manager so that it support
local instantiation, but this is for another thread I suppose.)
In addition, another object, specific to XWS, is used to describe what
buttons the applications should expose on the right (like "Add wiki page",
"Edit this page", etc. in the Wiki application), to describe how the title
of a page should be computed, and finally to describe what the form for
adding a entry via the lightbox (through the "+" button) should be.
The simplest way of understanding how this really works, is certainly to
look how one of the existing application is built, the Wiki one for
example. You can edit XWSApps.WikiApp with the object editor to see its
two descriptors, and read the documents under XWSWiki/ for the code of the
application itself.
Now to sum up my view on the topic I would say that:
- It is certainly too early to advertise XWS application development (with
a tutorial on
workspaces.xwiki.org for example)
- but this is something we should do at some point
- It would be awesome if XE apps (wiki apps) and XWS apps (spaces apps)
could be both handled by application manager, and IMHO we should tend
towards this goal.
Regards,
Jerome.
Thanks
-Vincent
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