Easy XWiki Summary (1.x)

Last modified by Vincent Massol on 2024/02/26 17:54

 XWiki
 Requirements
 Completed
 

Description

In July of 2009, many members from the XWiki Open-Source community met to talk about the product. One of the sessions they ran was "Easy XWiki", a session deicated to find out what could be improved to make the first 30 minutes of XWiki use more pleasant. Here is the summary of their findings.

Easy XWiki

Here is a summary of what people said about making XWiki Enterprise easier to use.

Work in Progress

User Interface

Dashboard

Spaces

  • Give more information about each space
  • Use the title of the space's homepage as a title for the whole space
  • Create space descriptors?

Recent Changes

  • There should be no changes displayed when starting a new wiki
  • Since a new wiki has had no activity going on, why are some modifications displayed?
  • System page modifications should be hidden for normal users

Tag Cloud

  • The tag cloud is hidden at the bottom of the list of spaces and hard to see

Page Actions

We should have only information available from the view mode, not stuff scattered all around the place, the user should be able to see 3 main things:

  • where am I?
  • what am I doing?
  • what can I do?

Things should be easily answered by looking at the page. Right now we do not have a functional model that encompasses all this.

Action bar

  • move the action bar (edit, show, watch...) closer to page content
  • shortcuts should be described in the action menu
  • use icons in the action bar to make it easier to understand
  • splitting the action bar between local and global actions and create 2 menus
    • global one -> administration, create new content, manage watchlist
    • page menu -> actions related to the current page

Logged-in / Logged-out

  • When not logged-in -> edit action is hidden
    • display the edit action as disabled to let people know it's a wiki
    • on a public website you don't want to see the action bar for guests anyway

Page creation

  • streamline the link creation process -> make it faster, more simple
    • make document information more visible
  • page creation panel on the right side that isn't good
    • when in the blog interface, it duplicates the creation panel (context issue)
    • should be a button
    • where is the page created? which other pages is the created page related to?
    • all create actions made contextual to the wiki (from treeview, from wikilinks)
  • add tags, categories when creating a page

Titles

  • page title issue -> name vs title, it's confusing
  • use document titles instead of page names as much as possible
    • uniform name management when creating new pages

Avatars

  • comments lack the user avatar
  • make user avatars easy to use (macro)

Other

  • too much information in search results, in the dashboard -> when you open it for the first time there's a lot of information but the user doesn't know where it comes from
  • create panel should be improved -> create space is in the wrong place
  • treeview navigation is confusing, it's hard to understand its logic right now
  • information about comments, attachments, history to put at the top of the page? -> nobody sees them

Consistency

  • same skin for the administration as for everything else
  • unify the looks of the edit and view mode
    • in-place editing
    • same place, same configuration, nothing different but the edit

Configuration & Administration

Configuration

  • first interaction -> first thing the user sees when the homepage is displayed -> display additional information for the first time -> steps you have to do to configure your wiki. Basic steps required to make your wiki work. Popup?
  • hidden pages / spaces -> all pages in the space are hidden = hidden space?

Administration

  • New spaces appear once I've logged in as an Admin. Why?
  • Create accounts for new users -> I don't really know where to go. 
  • What is the order of icons in the administration? Why is it like that?
    • Explanatations for each item in administration (captions, tooltips)
    • Why OpenOffice? What is it doing here? It's an option.
    • Registration is confusing
  • Administration: drop-down & "Show available categories" button put together. Why is that so?
    • The drop-down menu isn't self-explanatory, it doesn't tell anything about itself
    • "Add new user" should be at the top of the page
    • Clicking on "Create new user" launches a popup -> various interaction styles
      • what's mandatory, what's optional?
      • no error messages, information gets lost
      • email field not used by default
      • automatically generate a password for the user (-> invitation manager)
      • configuring registration options / process in XWiki in complicated
      • email addresses are hidden in the user profile
      • user profile -> actions are not in the right place
    • put user into a group
      • group names suck, system groups are not identified as such
      • edit button -> what am I editing, group name of group members? Right now renaming a group will break configured rights
      • on a group page -> "add user to group" button
      • local & global users -> what does that mean on a standard XE instance?
    • configuring rights
      • rights inheritance
      • it's dangerous to change XWikiAllGroup and XWikiAdminGroup rights yet it can be done easily
      • the deny warning is painful
      • select the rights you want and then apply them -> make the rights transactional (button to save)
      • revert rights to the default setting button
      • describe every right and explain how to set them
  • sometimes configuration cannot be achieved but through objects -> an interface should always be available to make this explicit
    • hide technical pages even from admin, the admin shouldn't see everything -> like in windows, let people see / hide hidden documents

Help

  • Add an "Help" panel between Search and Quick Links
  • Make the link to the user guide more obvious
  • Contextual help
  • Make the help more obvious
    • when there's only one user in the wiki, display all the help, message disappears once another user has been created
  • make the user guide easier to find, it cannot be found easily right now

Language

  • Create language-specific distribution
    • Select the language from the installer
    • Choose the language of your wiki from the installer
  • translations are painful and confusing to setup -> hard to find, hard to set, translations don't appear in all pages at once, when on a given page it's hard to know in which languages it has been translated.
    • lack of feedback when setting up translations

 

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