A few days ago, I was complaining on twitter about the usability of
the blog interface in XWiki and Vincent suggested that I send my
observations to this list, so here goes...
I've been using the XWiki blog for a few months (we have an
installation of 1.4-MILESTONE-2.9478, but my notes apply to the 1.5
version I just downloaded and tried) and a few annoyances have bubbled
up
XWiki blog UI notes
- When creating a blog entry, there's some help text "page name" in
the text
input. That should be automatically cleared when I click into the
text input
field so I don't have to select and delete it myself. The same
with the
boilerplate helper text in the blog article entry page.
- When you have exactly ten articles, you get a "next" link that takes
you to
to a page with no entries in it.
- When you have more than ten articles, the "next" button takes you
backwards in time. That's pretty confusing. I would expect the
pager link
to say something like "earlier entries" and "later entries." When
you have
quite a few blog entries and you are a few pages in, this can be
very confusing.
- I often want to see the full index of blog entries so I can easily
go to
earlier entries. Only having the paged view of blog entries is very
difficult
to navigate through when there are lots of blog entries.
- When I'm reading the blog entries, I would like to expand the full
contents
inline instead of having to click forward to the single blog entry
view. When
I'm reading a lot of blog entries at once, or scanning them, or
looking for a
particular blog entry in a long list, I want to be able to read
them within
the same page context without being yanked out of the blog entry
list UI
context.
- I would like an out-of-the-box way to segregate blogs other than
just by
category. I'd like some blog customization features built into the
standard
wiki UI.
- It's very difficult to find the correct RSS URL to subscribe to the
blog
syndication. It's nearly impossible to figure out how to get the
correct RSS
URL to subscribe to blog entries of a particular category (I
figured it out,
but it was a total guess on my part by adding the magic url
parameter). I
really expect an RSS link on the blog pages.
- I still haven't figured out how to make the max number of articles
in the RSS
feed larger than the default. I was trying to work around the
limitations of
the standard blog UI and use an RSS reader to get an index of all
of the
entries, but I couldn't figure out how to get the RSS feed to spit
all of
them out, since I have more than the max entries.
Anyway, those are my observations. I hope they help.
Cheers,
--Orion
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