[xwiki-users] [Brainstorming] Home Page concept (was Re: New Page Has No Parent)
Hi Edy and all, On 5 Jan 2016 at 11:52:24, Eduard Moraru ([email protected](mailto:[email protected])) wrote:
Hi Randy,
From your choice of words (and your continued usage of the now deprecated "spaces" macro on the homepage, as observed in the screenshot you`ve provided), I understand that you still see things in terms of "creating spaces" and "creating documents inside spaces" in 7.4 and, IMO, that`s really the issue.
In case you`ve missed it from the release notes, starting with 7.2, we`ve introduced the notion of Nested Pages [1], which means that you no longer have the notion of "pages inside spaces", but always "pages inside pages". Technically, it is actually implemented by always creating a "space" when you create a page from the UI, but the user should see it as if he is always creating a page.
= Use Case 1 =
When your users go to your homepage and create a new page "under the Main space", they are actually creating a nested page (old "space"), under the homepage (document called "Main") of your wiki. If you change [2] the homepage of your wiki to point to a different document instead (say "Some.Other.Homepage"), I`m fairly sure that you do not want your users to start creating new pages as children of that page (e.g. "Some.Other.Homepage.NewUserPage"), because that is what the alternative would lead to.
The logic behind the original decision of handling the homepage differently was that, even as Guillaume was hinting, the homepage is seen as the "root" of your wiki. Creating a page from the root should result in creating top level pages, not child pages. If you wanted to create a child page of something from the homepage, you would explicitly do so by selecting a parent. Not selecting a parent while on the homepage would logically imply that you want to create a page in the wiki (i.e. top page).
I`m curious why do you find it normal the other way around, i.e. landing on the wiki (i.e. not navigating somewhere in particular) + creating a new page => resulting in creating a child page of the "Main" page (which happens to be the homepage).
If you always create child pages of the homepage ("Main" page), on the long run, all your URLs will be /Main/This/Page, /Main/That/Page, /Main/That/Other/Page, etc... but ultimately, what is this "Main", and why is it that important to drag it along in all your page URLs? (of course, again, if you change your homepage to "Some.Other.Homepage", all your urls will be prefixed by that!)
= Use case 2 =
Now, another way of looking at this would be that, for some reason, you *really* want to keep all your content under some top level page (e.g. as Vincent suggested, a "Content" container page), perhaps to separate it from applications (which, for historic reasons, currently are also located in the top level) like Blog, Sandbox, etc. or any other reason.
The only limitation in this usecase is if you also want to use that container page ("Main", "Content", etc.) as your homepage. In this case, indeed, I see no other solution but to modify the createinline.vm template or for us to drop this behavior altogether.
---
Conclusion so far: We have 2 use cases regarding a new page's parent. They can both coexist, except that, in some cases, the 2nd use case is limited by the first use case. If we consider this limitation to be a deal breaker, then we are left with 2 choices: A. Drop use case 1 (i.e. always propose the current page as parent of the new page, regardless if the current page is the homepage or not) B. Make use case 1 configurable (i.e. enable or disable it completely, in case you are suffering from the limitation of the second use case; this allows the user to decide if it's useful or not)
Of course, if option B is what we go for, we also need to figure out where we would put such a configuration.
I would be in favor of option B (since I obviously believe that use case 1 is something useful for the majority of cases), but have no idea on the location of the configuration.
WDYT?
I agree about what you’ve said above. However I think the main problem comes from the fact that the user doesn’t know: * That he’s on a special page (home page). He sees himself/herself on the Main/WebHome page, i.e. in the Main space. * The user doesn’t realize that the home page of his/her wiki is a virtual page that can be configured to point to any page and that it just happens that by default it’s been set to point to Main.WebHome. * It can even be argued that the home page doesn’t exist and that the user is redirected to the page configured in the main wiki’s descriptor, i.e. Main.WebHome and thus when you click “+” to add a new page you’re not on the home page anywhere but on Main.WebHome. So, I see 2 choices: 1) Option A, i.e. "drop use case 1 (i.e. always propose the current page as parent of the new page, regardless if the current page is the homepage or not)." 2) Find a way to make the home page special and different from Main.WebHome. It could be a special URL as suggested by Guillaume in a previous post, such as http://localhost:8080/xwiki/bin/view/ and it would redirect to a special resource type for the home page, which would be served as a template. For example: http://localhost:8080/xwiki/home. This would be easy to implement. Of course we would keep the ability to configure where the home page of the main wiki points to in the Admin UI and /home would be used only when no custom configuration is defined so that it would still be easy for users to configure what they want to display on the home page. In order to make it simpler we could even introduce a "Home Page” entry in the Admin UI. We would also need to find some different content for Main.WebHome. I haven’t thought about all the consequences of 2) but at first sight it seems it could be something that could work and could even solve the issue we currently have of it being hard to edit. Note that the home page wouldn’t have an Edit button. Seen differently, the home page would be controllable only by an Admin, which IMO can make sense. So, all in all, I think I’d be in favor of solution 2) (unless some gotchas). Barring that, I’d prefer solution 1) instead of option B above. WDYT? Thanks -Vincent
Thanks for all your feedback so far and I`m counting on your help and anyone else interested to reach a conclusion regarding this.
-Eduard
---------- [1] http://platform.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Features/ContentOrganization [2] http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/FAQ/How+to+change+the+home+page+destinat...
On Mon, Jan 4, 2016 at 3:13 PM, Randy Havens < [email protected]> wrote:
So if we bring back the old behavior as-is we'd still have to find a solution for top-level space creation.
That’s already taken care of. This is how I always created spaces before: (this is a screenshot from my 7.4 instance, so I know that it is still an option)
[cid:[email protected]]
A suggestion I had now that nested spaces are activated by default was to make the home page of the wiki be "above" every other space. Said differently, the home page would reside directly at https:///xwiki/bin/view/ without anything else being mentioned. From that page you'd be able to create top-level spaces, and every other page would behave as expected, including Main.WebHome. I think this is what would feel the most natural, but it causes many underlying issues, notably because a page with no document reference cannot really exist in XWiki right now.
I agree. This seems to be a sensible solution.
image001.png (23K) < http://xwiki.475771.n2.nabble.com/attachment/7597376/0/image001.png>
Hi Vincent, Thanks for creating a new thread, since that`s what I should have done myself. I approached this as a discussion about what is the good/sensible default that better fits 80-90% of the user's needs, as opposed to not having this default and the user ending up with "Main" (or whetever else) everywhere (i.e. cons of not doing Use Case 1). On Wed, Jan 6, 2016 at 10:39 AM, [email protected] <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi Edy and all,
On 5 Jan 2016 at 11:52:24, Eduard Moraru ([email protected](mailto: [email protected])) wrote:
Hi Randy,
From your choice of words (and your continued usage of the now deprecated "spaces" macro on the homepage, as observed in the screenshot you`ve provided), I understand that you still see things in terms of "creating spaces" and "creating documents inside spaces" in 7.4 and, IMO, that`s really the issue.
In case you`ve missed it from the release notes, starting with 7.2, we`ve introduced the notion of Nested Pages [1], which means that you no longer have the notion of "pages inside spaces", but always "pages inside pages". Technically, it is actually implemented by always creating a "space" when you create a page from the UI, but the user should see it as if he is always creating a page.
= Use Case 1 =
When your users go to your homepage and create a new page "under the Main space", they are actually creating a nested page (old "space"), under the homepage (document called "Main") of your wiki. If you change [2] the homepage of your wiki to point to a different document instead (say "Some.Other.Homepage"), I`m fairly sure that you do not want your users to start creating new pages as children of that page (e.g. "Some.Other.Homepage.NewUserPage"), because that is what the alternative would lead to.
The logic behind the original decision of handling the homepage differently was that, even as Guillaume was hinting, the homepage is seen as the "root" of your wiki. Creating a page from the root should result in creating top level pages, not child pages. If you wanted to create a child page of something from the homepage, you would explicitly do so by selecting a parent. Not selecting a parent while on the homepage would logically imply that you want to create a page in the wiki (i.e. top page).
I`m curious why do you find it normal the other way around, i.e. landing on the wiki (i.e. not navigating somewhere in particular) + creating a new page => resulting in creating a child page of the "Main" page (which happens to be the homepage).
If you always create child pages of the homepage ("Main" page), on the long run, all your URLs will be /Main/This/Page, /Main/That/Page, /Main/That/Other/Page, etc... but ultimately, what is this "Main", and why is it that important to drag it along in all your page URLs? (of course, again, if you change your homepage to "Some.Other.Homepage", all your urls will be prefixed by that!)
= Use case 2 =
Now, another way of looking at this would be that, for some reason, you *really* want to keep all your content under some top level page (e.g. as Vincent suggested, a "Content" container page), perhaps to separate it from applications (which, for historic reasons, currently are also located in the top level) like Blog, Sandbox, etc. or any other reason.
The only limitation in this usecase is if you also want to use that container page ("Main", "Content", etc.) as your homepage. In this case, indeed, I see no other solution but to modify the createinline.vm template or for us to drop this behavior altogether.
---
Conclusion so far: We have 2 use cases regarding a new page's parent. They can both coexist, except that, in some cases, the 2nd use case is limited by the first use case. If we consider this limitation to be a deal breaker, then we are left with 2 choices: A. Drop use case 1 (i.e. always propose the current page as parent of the new page, regardless if the current page is the homepage or not) B. Make use case 1 configurable (i.e. enable or disable it completely, in case you are suffering from the limitation of the second use case; this allows the user to decide if it's useful or not)
Of course, if option B is what we go for, we also need to figure out where we would put such a configuration.
I would be in favor of option B (since I obviously believe that use case 1 is something useful for the majority of cases), but have no idea on the location of the configuration.
WDYT?
I agree about what you’ve said above. However I think the main problem comes from the fact that the user doesn’t know: * That he’s on a special page (home page). He sees himself/herself on the Main/WebHome page, i.e. in the Main space.
Why would the user care at this point? Are you talking about the case when a user actually wants to create a new sub-page under the Main page? In this case we would have a 3rd Use Case that I have not covered in my previous mail, which, indeed, would be affected by Use Case 1. * The user doesn’t realize that the home page of his/her wiki is a virtual
page that can be configured to point to any page and that it just happens that by default it’s been set to point to Main.WebHome. * It can even be argued that the home page doesn’t exist and that the user is redirected to the page configured in the main wiki’s descriptor, i.e. Main.WebHome and thus when you click “+” to add a new page you’re not on the home page anywhere but on Main.WebHome.
So, I see 2 choices:
1) Option A, i.e. "drop use case 1 (i.e. always propose the current page as parent of the new page, regardless if the current page is the homepage or not)."
2) Find a way to make the home page special and different from Main.WebHome. It could be a special URL as suggested by Guillaume in a previous post, such as http://localhost:8080/xwiki/bin/view/ and it would redirect to a special resource type for the home page, which would be served as a template. For example: http://localhost:8080/xwiki/home. This would be easy to implement. Of course we would keep the ability to configure where the home page of the main wiki points to in the Admin UI and /home would be used only when no custom configuration is defined so that it would still be easy for users to configure what they want to display on the home page. In order to make it simpler we could even introduce a "Home Page” entry in the Admin UI. We would also need to find some different content for Main.WebHome.
I find this solution a bit too complicated on first sight and it might cause more problems than it fixes. On the plus side, it would maybe help differentiating where the user comes *from*. For example, if the user is on /xwiki/home, then he's on the homepage and we can apply UseCase1, but if the user is on /xwiki/bin/view/Main/, then he is just browsing to a page and there we can/should not apply UseCase1 since if he wants to create a new page there, he most likely wants the current page as parent. This advantage would help in Use Case 3, identified above. Configuring and getting the homepage programatically would still be done as before, so overall, this would just be a resource/action/template that is linked to from the logo, nothing more. However, the question still remains for the limitation on Use Case 2, if the admin wants to funnel new pages under a certain parent page (which is the same as the homepage), so we still need a configuration (a.k.a. Option B) to be able to support that as well.
I haven’t thought about all the consequences of 2) but at first sight it seems it could be something that could work and could even solve the issue we currently have of it being hard to edit. Note that the home page wouldn’t have an Edit button. Seen differently, the home page would be controllable only by an Admin, which IMO can make sense.
So, all in all, I think I’d be in favor of solution 2) (unless some gotchas). Barring that, I’d prefer solution 1) instead of option B above.
I might also be inclined towards solution 2) because it solves Use Case 3 + has the ability to control the UI (remove the edit button). I`m not a fan of the complexity of this solution though and the questions it could rise on the long run... "What is this home, is it a resource? Can I use it programatically? etc..." My main objective was to remove the "Main" aspect out of XWiki`s URLs since it`s something we no longer technically/actually/really need (compared to the pre-ND XWiki versions, where the space part was *technically* mandatory, so we came up with "Main"). Any other thoughts? Thanks, Eduard
WDYT?
Thanks -Vincent
Thanks for all your feedback so far and I`m counting on your help and anyone else interested to reach a conclusion regarding this.
-Eduard
---------- [1] http://platform.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Features/ContentOrganization [2]
http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/FAQ/How+to+change+the+home+page+destinat...
On Mon, Jan 4, 2016 at 3:13 PM, Randy Havens < [email protected]> wrote:
So if we bring back the old behavior as-is we'd still have to find a solution for top-level space creation.
That’s already taken care of. This is how I always created spaces
before:
(this is a screenshot from my 7.4 instance, so I know that it is still an option)
[cid:[email protected]]
A suggestion I had now that nested spaces are activated by default was to make the home page of the wiki be "above" every other space. Said differently, the home page would reside directly at https:///xwiki/bin/view/ without anything else being mentioned. From that page you'd be able to create top-level spaces, and every other page would behave as expected, including Main.WebHome. I think this is what would feel the most natural, but it causes many underlying issues, notably because a page with no document reference cannot really exist in XWiki right now.
I agree. This seems to be a sensible solution.
image001.png (23K) < http://xwiki.475771.n2.nabble.com/attachment/7597376/0/image001.png>
_______________________________________________ users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/users
Hi, On Wed, Jan 6, 2016 at 1:54 PM, Eduard Moraru <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi Vincent,
Thanks for creating a new thread, since that`s what I should have done myself.
I approached this as a discussion about what is the good/sensible default that better fits 80-90% of the user's needs, as opposed to not having this default and the user ending up with "Main" (or whetever else) everywhere (i.e. cons of not doing Use Case 1).
On Wed, Jan 6, 2016 at 10:39 AM, [email protected] <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi Edy and all,
On 5 Jan 2016 at 11:52:24, Eduard Moraru ([email protected](mailto: [email protected])) wrote:
Hi Randy,
From your choice of words (and your continued usage of the now deprecated "spaces" macro on the homepage, as observed in the screenshot you`ve provided), I understand that you still see things in terms of "creating spaces" and "creating documents inside spaces" in 7.4 and, IMO, that`s really the issue.
In case you`ve missed it from the release notes, starting with 7.2, we`ve introduced the notion of Nested Pages [1], which means that you no longer have the notion of "pages inside spaces", but always "pages inside pages". Technically, it is actually implemented by always creating a "space" when you create a page from the UI, but the user should see it as if he is always creating a page.
= Use Case 1 =
When your users go to your homepage and create a new page "under the Main space", they are actually creating a nested page (old "space"), under the homepage (document called "Main") of your wiki. If you change [2] the homepage of your wiki to point to a different document instead (say "Some.Other.Homepage"), I`m fairly sure that you do not want your users to start creating new pages as children of that page (e.g. "Some.Other.Homepage.NewUserPage"), because that is what the alternative would lead to.
The logic behind the original decision of handling the homepage differently was that, even as Guillaume was hinting, the homepage is seen as the "root" of your wiki. Creating a page from the root should result in creating top level pages, not child pages. If you wanted to create a child page of something from the homepage, you would explicitly do so by selecting a parent. Not selecting a parent while on the homepage would logically imply that you want to create a page in the wiki (i.e. top page).
I`m curious why do you find it normal the other way around, i.e. landing on the wiki (i.e. not navigating somewhere in particular) + creating a new page => resulting in creating a child page of the "Main" page (which happens to be the homepage).
If you always create child pages of the homepage ("Main" page), on the long run, all your URLs will be /Main/This/Page, /Main/That/Page, /Main/That/Other/Page, etc... but ultimately, what is this "Main", and why is it that important to drag it along in all your page URLs? (of course, again, if you change your homepage to "Some.Other.Homepage", all your urls will be prefixed by that!)
= Use case 2 =
Now, another way of looking at this would be that, for some reason, you *really* want to keep all your content under some top level page (e.g. as Vincent suggested, a "Content" container page), perhaps to separate it from applications (which, for historic reasons, currently are also located in the top level) like Blog, Sandbox, etc. or any other reason.
The only limitation in this usecase is if you also want to use that container page ("Main", "Content", etc.) as your homepage. In this case, indeed, I see no other solution but to modify the createinline.vm template or for us to drop this behavior altogether.
---
Conclusion so far: We have 2 use cases regarding a new page's parent. They can both coexist, except that, in some cases, the 2nd use case is limited by the first use case. If we consider this limitation to be a deal breaker, then we are left with 2 choices: A. Drop use case 1 (i.e. always propose the current page as parent of the new page, regardless if the current page is the homepage or not) B. Make use case 1 configurable (i.e. enable or disable it completely, in case you are suffering from the limitation of the second use case; this allows the user to decide if it's useful or not)
Of course, if option B is what we go for, we also need to figure out where we would put such a configuration.
I would be in favor of option B (since I obviously believe that use case 1 is something useful for the majority of cases), but have no idea on the location of the configuration.
WDYT?
I agree about what you’ve said above. However I think the main problem comes from the fact that the user doesn’t know: * That he’s on a special page (home page). He sees himself/herself on the Main/WebHome page, i.e. in the Main space.
Why would the user care at this point?
Are you talking about the case when a user actually wants to create a new sub-page under the Main page? In this case we would have a 3rd Use Case that I have not covered in my previous mail, which, indeed, would be affected by Use Case 1.
* The user doesn’t realize that the home page of his/her wiki is a virtual
page that can be configured to point to any page and that it just happens that by default it’s been set to point to Main.WebHome. * It can even be argued that the home page doesn’t exist and that the user is redirected to the page configured in the main wiki’s descriptor, i.e. Main.WebHome and thus when you click “+” to add a new page you’re not on the home page anywhere but on Main.WebHome.
So, I see 2 choices:
1) Option A, i.e. "drop use case 1 (i.e. always propose the current page as parent of the new page, regardless if the current page is the homepage or not)."
2) Find a way to make the home page special and different from Main.WebHome. It could be a special URL as suggested by Guillaume in a previous post, such as http://localhost:8080/xwiki/bin/view/ and it would redirect to a special resource type for the home page, which would be served as a template. For example: http://localhost:8080/xwiki/home. This would be easy to implement. Of course we would keep the ability to configure where the home page of the main wiki points to in the Admin UI and /home would be used only when no custom configuration is defined so that it would still be easy for users to configure what they want to display on the home page. In order to make it simpler we could even introduce a "Home Page” entry in the Admin UI. We would also need to find some different content for Main.WebHome.
I find this solution a bit too complicated on first sight and it might cause more problems than it fixes.
On the plus side, it would maybe help differentiating where the user comes *from*. For example, if the user is on /xwiki/home, then he's on the homepage and we can apply UseCase1, but if the user is on /xwiki/bin/view/Main/, then he is just browsing to a page and there we can/should not apply UseCase1 since if he wants to create a new page there, he most likely wants the current page as parent. This advantage would help in Use Case 3, identified above.
Configuring and getting the homepage programatically would still be done as before, so overall, this would just be a resource/action/template that is linked to from the logo, nothing more.
However, the question still remains for the limitation on Use Case 2, if the admin wants to funnel new pages under a certain parent page (which is the same as the homepage), so we still need a configuration (a.k.a. Option B) to be able to support that as well.
I haven’t thought about all the consequences of 2) but at first sight it seems it could be something that could work and could even solve the issue we currently have of it being hard to edit. Note that the home page wouldn’t have an Edit button. Seen differently, the home page would be controllable only by an Admin, which IMO can make sense.
Agreed. However, should the admin decide to include another page to act as the home, wouldn't it be possible to put a link that would send the user to edit that page (same as we do for the "Welcome" widget right now)?
So, all in all, I think I’d be in favor of solution 2) (unless some
gotchas). Barring that, I’d prefer solution 1) instead of option B above.
I might also be inclined towards solution 2) because it solves Use Case 3 + has the ability to control the UI (remove the edit button). I`m not a fan of the complexity of this solution though and the questions it could rise on the long run... "What is this home, is it a resource? Can I use it programatically? etc..."
My main objective was to remove the "Main" aspect out of XWiki`s URLs since it`s something we no longer technically/actually/really need (compared to the pre-ND XWiki versions, where the space part was *technically* mandatory, so we came up with "Main").
Any other thoughts?
I also like Solution 2) as outlined by Vincent. The only downside I see is the fact that there will no longer be an "Edit" button on the homepage, but then on most wikis I've seen users are not supposed to change it anyway, it's left to the wiki admin / initiator, especially when that page acts as a dashboard. The next question (could be for another thread) if we do this would be to decide whether our current homepage (which is Dashboard.WebHome) is the best default homepage for XWiki or whether there's a better default option. I know that on many wikis I remove it altogether to replace it with simply the activity stream. Thanks, Guillaume Thanks,
Eduard
WDYT?
Thanks -Vincent
Thanks for all your feedback so far and I`m counting on your help and anyone else interested to reach a conclusion regarding this.
-Eduard
---------- [1] http://platform.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Features/ContentOrganization [2]
http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/FAQ/How+to+change+the+home+page+destinat...
On Mon, Jan 4, 2016 at 3:13 PM, Randy Havens < [email protected]> wrote:
So if we bring back the old behavior as-is we'd still have to find a solution for top-level space creation.
That’s already taken care of. This is how I always created spaces
before:
(this is a screenshot from my 7.4 instance, so I know that it is still an option)
[cid:[email protected]]
A suggestion I had now that nested spaces are activated by default was to make the home page of the wiki be "above" every other space. Said differently, the home page would reside directly at https:///xwiki/bin/view/ without anything else being mentioned. From that page you'd be able to create top-level spaces, and every other page would behave as expected, including Main.WebHome. I think this is what would feel the most natural, but it causes many underlying issues, notably because a page with no document reference cannot really exist in XWiki right now.
I agree. This seems to be a sensible solution.
image001.png (23K) < http://xwiki.475771.n2.nabble.com/attachment/7597376/0/image001.png>
_______________________________________________ users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/users
_______________________________________________ users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/users
participants (3)
-
Eduard Moraru -
Guillaume Lerouge -
vincent＠massol.net