Kevin_C a écrit :

Hi all,

First, I'm a total wiki newb. I've been tasked with evaluating xwiki for use by the state agency I work for in order to determine whether or not xwiki can meet our needs as a means to share information both internally and externally. From my initial poking around it looks like xwiki will be fairly easy to work with once I've had the opportunity to wrap my head around some of the seemingly less documented pieces like the Object model and development process.

My first task is to replace a set of existing FAQs that have been done with static HTML files. I've worked through the FAQ tutorial but my needs are a bit more extensive and I'm not sure exactly how to modify the example to meet these needs. Here are the main requirements I'm needing to address:

1) Support for Categories and Sub-Categories for questions. Used for displaying questions grouped by sub-category within each of the main Categories.

Would this just be a matter of adding a category property to my FAQ class? How would I then access the full list of Categories from the main space in order to link to each set of FAQs?

You might want to steal the category/subcategory system of the new blog application just released in XWiki 1.8M1 or available as a separate xar here http://maven.xwiki.org/snapshots/com/xpn/xwiki/platform/applications/xwiki-a...

2) Within each Category (I figured I'd create each main category as a new Space) support for specifying certain users who can add new Questions and Answers.

I think I kind of have an idea on how to do this using the user/group frameworks. I just wanted to get an idea of whether this sort of restriction is doable within the existing rights system.

In general spaces should be used for mainly security purposes. So this seems a good reason for your use-case. However wouldn't you want an entry to be in multiple categories ? This will be complex with spaces.

3) Creation of global template for creating/editing and viewing FAQ entries.

This is similar to the FAQ tutorial with a main difference being the ability to specify an existing sub-category or to create a new sub-category for the main category the user has permission to create questions/answers for.

This could be a reuse of both the FAQ and/or BLOG applications.

4) Main space that acts as a sort of jumping off point for the FAQs. Contains links to all of the main FAQ categories and possibly some general information about submitting new questions and such.

I figured I would create a main space and have the re-usable objects defined in it and then have a single page that acts as the entry point to the FAQs.

You can create macros and sheets and make the easily available. You can insert sheets using #includeForm("pagename") and macros using #includeMacros("pagename")

Are there docs for the xwiki object model? How can I find out what properties and methods are available on xwiki objects? Are there docs that explain how to use velocity scripting to do custom queries to retrieve the data to be displayed in a given page?

Check http://platform.xwiki.org You might want to start with the tutorials

----- Does this all seem doable in the xwiki system? yes

Does it make sense to develop each major category of FAQ as a Space within the wiki? Only if rights is needed I'm doing this mainly because of the editing restrictions, is it necessary? This is a decent reason. You can also store rights using groups on a per entry basis. But this is not so easy to manage. If you are sure each category will have a specific group allowed to edit a space is good.

Can someone provide a general idea of how I might go about creating this FAQ system that allows questions to be categorized and then fetched/displayed by Category/Sub-Category?!?

Steal the new blog application Ludovic

Thanks!! Kevin Cummings

-- Ludovic Dubost Blog: http://blog.ludovic.org/ XWiki: http://www.xwiki.com Skype: ldubost GTalk: ldubost