Hi Anton,
thanks for your feedback. As you noticed, XWiki is currently undergoing
significant changes in the way we handle pages and all the associated kinks
have not been worked out yet. If I may, one solution for you could be to
switch back to XWiki Enterprise 7.1 for the moment, and upgrade at a later
point in time, once things are more stable with regards to nested pages.
Regarding the way pages are organized, while I agree that the tree
organization can cause confusion for users coming from MediaWiki, the power
and flexibility coming with this (cascading rights in particular) would be
missed by users going the other way round.
Now clearly there are some difficulties coming from the fact that some
pages are nested and others aren't (I started a separate thread on this
topic). Specifically, the fact that the syntax requires "WebHome" to be
explicitly mentioned is annoying and I hope we'll be able to fix it soon.
Out of curiosity, since you seem to be familiar with MediaWiki, is there a
specific reason why you decided to go with XWiki this time?
In any case, thanks for all the feedback! Getting a fresh point of view
from newcomers is very valuable, even though we can sometimes react a bit
defensively.
Best,
Guillaume
On Friday, 27 November 2015, vincent(a)massol.net <vincent(a)massol.net> wrote:
Hi Anton,
On 26 Nov 2015 at 20:44:35, Anton Hughes (ah(a)tradeworks.io <javascript:;>
(mailto:ah@tradeworks.io <javascript:;>)) wrote:
On 26 November 2015 at 20:33, vincent(a)massol.net <javascript:;>(mailto:
vincent(a)massol.net <javascript:;>) wrote:
> It works. Create a page with [[test]].
You’ll see a question mark
(wanted link). Click on it, add content and save.
Navigate back to your
first page. The link works.
>
> What you’re showing in the screenshots is orange and apples. In one
link you
link to a new page called MyExamplePage. And in the second one you
link to a page named MyExamplePage.WebHome.
>
> In Mediawiki try create a page2 that exists (and a page1 that
doesn’t). Then
write in another page:
Youre missing my point.
I'm trying to point out how difficult it is, without prior knowledge, to
do
just a simple link.
You answer by giving me links to all sorts of
docs.
As I tried to illustrate, I have already created a page called
MyExamplePage.
Writing [[MyExamplePage]] does NOT link to it. To correctly
link to it need to study documentation, and write a lot more.
The correct link is
[[MyExamplePage>>doc:MyExamplePage.WebHome]]
This is not easy. This is not natural. This does not help collaboration.
This does
require studying documentation.
Obviously for you, who use this product everyday, you think Im just
complaining
about nothing. But, dont take my word - just ask any normal
user what ' [[MyExamplePage>>doc:MyExamplePage.WebHome]]' means. No one in
my office has a clue.
A wiki is about making things simple for everyday
users - but you are a
heavy duty technical user. Xwiki has taken the concept of
wiki and made it
brittle and technical.
We exchanged a lot of emails yesterday. Let me try to summarize my
position:
* I appreciate your feedback a lot, especially as it comes from someone
not used to XWiki. This allows to have an external view different from ours
which has been forged by years of using and developing XWiki.
* We currently have a problem starting with XWiki 7.2. We have a mismatch
between the XWiki internal model (which supports subwikis, nested spaces
and pages) and our UI in which we’re trying to completely hide the concept
of Spaces so that users only see Nested Pages (note that I’ve said Nested
Pages and not Nested Spaces). The issue surfaces when you start using wiki
links in markup, macros or scripting APIs, which all currently accept a
Reference (i.e. subwikis, nested spaces and pages, as in
wiki:space1.space2.page). So we map Nested Pages onto Nested Spaces by
always creating pages in a page named WebHome and in a space named after
the name of the page the user wants to use.
* I don’t agree with you that having a single organization namespace is
better than supporting hierarchies, and that the MediaWiki model is the
best.
* The format you mentioned above,
i.e. [[MyExamplePage>>doc:MyExamplePage.WebHome]] is the canonical format.
You can drop “doc:” (in which case XWiki assumes you reference a doc by
default). It’s there because we support lots of various other references:
urls, mailto, unc, etc. See the syntax guide for more.
* The only complaint I know of (before XWiki 7.2) about the format of our
links is that some user would have liked us to use the “/“ separator
instead of “.”, e.g. [[label>>space/page]] instead of [[label>>space.page]].
* XWiki supports tags and a Tag UI if you wish to have various views for
wiki pages. Note to self: we should add a “tag” parameter to the
{{documents/}} macro (
http://extensions.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Extension/Documents+Macro) to
list all docs with a given tag.
* Last, this feature of Nested Spaces and Nested Pages is very new
(started in XWiki 7.2 and we’re still tuning it). It’ll take some time more
for us to iron out all the wrinkles that result from it.
* We’re missing some documentation to explain all this. We’re also missing
autocompletion of link references in the wiki editor to make it easy to
link to existing pages.
Hope it helps.
Thanks
-Vincent
Anton Hughes
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