Hi all. So I installed the Xar on my xwiki with no errors. It's tied to an sql dB... For some reason it still doesn't have the "Register" option at the top right of the screen. It has "administration" and "Log In". Obviously no user can log in, because there are no users. Administration doesn't ask for a user name an password. Have any of you run into this before? thanks!! -Rob

Power user guide sounds good to me. Guillaume On 16/11/2007, Vincent Massol <vincent(a)massol.net> wrote: -- http://wikibc.blogspot.com/

Regarding the user guide, I'd split the feature presentation part (aimed to be a commercial content) and the real user guide. It confuses a bit (both users and prospectors) and doesn´t give the user a presentation of the features and how to use them in a step by step manner. Macros for instance are not present in the feature list while they're really nice to use. While internationalization is while it's not something you'd see in a user guide. Studying macros a bit more I realize they are that simple scripting language I was looking for. Some code snippets should be turned into macros like Child Page Snippet, Backlinks Snippet (or others) so advanced user can use them without fear, and without cluttering their wiki pages with real code. Macros could be part of the user guide or the "Advanced user" guide.

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.*

I'm happy to hear that. I hope I didn't seem to harsh on the feedback. I do think xwiki is a nice product! William

Hello *, I quite agree with all that's been said in this topic about usability. I must say also as old 0.9 versions user, that usability, user-friendliness, have been considerably improved since these old versions, thanks to xwiki great team ;-) So I believe this will continue to evolve and be better and better with new releases. About scripting : in my team we had "basic" end-users (not quite participative to start with), and 2 admins (including me). As admins we added much dynamic features in many pages, scripting, groovy, HTML, SQL requests and so on ... Now end-users are much more participative, and problem is that : - we broke possibility of using WYSIWYG editor on these highly dynamic pages - for end-users, editing these kind of pages is an awful experience, because it's not human-readable anymore (accepting developers are not completely human ;) ). In my opinion with XWiki architecture it should be strongly advised to separate "pure content" pages and dynamic or complex pages, using macros for example. It's a good development practice anyway, but you might not think about it when you start working on a wiki site. Anyway I don't regret using XWiki because it's a great wiki IMO, and I really appreciate the way it evolves Jeremie ________________________________ From: users-bounces(a)xwiki.org [mailto:users-bounces@xwiki.org] On Behalf Of Guillaume Lerouge Sent: mercredi 21 novembre 2007 11:15 To: XWiki Users Subject: Re: [xwiki-users] XWiki scripting for end user (not Groovy) I'm happy to hear that. I hope I didn't seem to harsh on the feedback. I do think xwiki is a nice product! XWiki users feel about our software. And hopefully you'll be bringing improvements to it on your own soon ;-) Guillaume William _______________________________________________ users mailing list users(a)xwiki.org http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/users -- http://wikibc.blogspot.com/

That's a nice trick used a lot in TWiki, plugins are based on this. Related to this there's a nice feature in TWiki I'd like to see in XWiki: section import. You can declare a section in a page and then only import that section of a page in another one. In this case it's really useful because you don't have to use multiple pages for each five lines of code to insert. In your plugin code page you create a page section for each plugin function. Then you can import those sections in your user pages. All code in one tidy place. In XWiki that could bedone with something like this: The declaration part: Some text in a page {section: MyFirstPageSection} some text in the section {section: MyFirstPageSection} Page continues... The include part: #includeTopic("Dev.ScriptPage|MyFirstPageSection") William