Easy XWiki

Stuff we can do to make XWiki easier to use.

Group 1

  • Yves - Laurent - Sergiu - Anca - Lucien

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 easily answered by looking at the page

We do not have a functional model

To achieve this: 

  • move the action bar (edit, show, watch...)
  • streamline the link creation process -> make it faster, more simple
  • information about comments, attachments, history to put at the top of the page? -> nobody sees them
    • 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
  • create 2 menus
    • global one -> administration, create new content, maage watchlist
    • page menu -> actions related to the current page
  • same skin for the administration than for everything else
  • language specific distributions (French, English, Spanish distribution)
    • select the language from the installer
    • set the default language to use when setting up the wiki
    • link to go to the administration to set the language
  • contextual help
  • unify the looks of the edit and view mode
    • in-place editing
    • same place, same configuration, nothing different but the edit
  • automatically propose links suggestions between documents since most content within enterprises isn't hyperlinked
  • ability to navigate thru pages with a pagination based on the page parent
    • most of the time information is accessed linearly, like in a PDF document
  • http://gsoc.myxwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Improving+the+setup+and+upgrade+process/Introduction

Group 2

  • ThomasE - Eduard - Ecaterina - ThomasM - Meryame

Scenario, like if we were an administrator installing an XWiki instance to test it for 4-5 users who want to create a marketing space and work in it. Download the installer, switch the installer to French -> why is the wiki still in english?

Arriving on the homepage -> I would like to get myself logged in. What's my account? I didn't read the documentation and I'm lost -> need to go back to XWiki.com / XWiki.org to find it. -> Add the info to the default XAR ?

Lot of recent changes even though I just installed my wiki. Some of them do not have an author. Ghost in the wiki? -> empty recent changes block if I'm on a blank wiki. Some spaces exist already and we don't know why they're here.

Do we need a sandbox space? Important for people who never used a wiki before. Space in the installed wiki where they can do stuff -> they don't necessarily know what a space is. Add some explanations to the wiki. Sandbox is usefulbut needs an explanation.

  • Add an "Help" panel between Search and Quick Links -> make the help more obvious
  • Make the link to the user guide more obvious.
  • Jump to page -> nobody knows what "Meta" is. 
  • 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
    • Filtering fields are not obvious to understand, specifically when there's not much information in a livetable
    • Put "create new item" at the top at all times
    • 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
    • create a different view of the wiki for developers and managers

Group 3

  • Émilie - Fabio - JV - Oana - Miruna

Didn't do a detailed analysis but came to the same conclusions.

  • 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?
    • when there's only one user in the wiki, display all the help, message disappears once another user has been created
  • Put the registration and the login on the same page + automatic login after registration
  • 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
  • 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
  • clearly show important operations that can be done in a page (rename, delete) -> context oriented operations, show available actions more clearly
  • sometimes configuration cannot be achieved but through objects -> an interface should always be available to make this explicit
  • attachment names get stripped -> that's confusing
  • treeview navigation is confusing, it's hard to understand its logic right now
  • page title issue -> name vs title, it's confusing
  • hidden pages / spaces -> all pages in the space are hidden = hidden space?
    • hide technical pages even from admin, the admin shouldn't see everything -> like in windows, let people see / hide hidden documents
  • shortcuts should be described in the action menu

Group 4

  • Guillaume - Jérôme - Marius - Raluca
  • recent changes in the dashboard
  • space descriptor to give more information about the spaces and what they are
    • show the title of the homepage of the space
  • make the user guide easier to find, it cannot be found easily right now
  • 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
  • use icons in the action bar to make it easier to understand
  • more tooltips, lots of things don't have tooltips, they could be useful in lots of places
  • use document titles instead of page names as much as possible
    • curriki: when you hover over a link -> JS tooltip that provides metadata about the page (author, date)
  • use either "page" or "document" as the default naming
  • the layout changes when you go to the blog -> what happens when your skin has a left column?
    • it can be configured in the panel wizard
    • the fact that the layout changes is annoying (consistency issue)
  • splitting the action bar between local and global actions
  • create page panel -> jerome showed something he did for Glon
    • see what the URL of the page you're about to create will look like
    • uniform name management when creating new pages
  • comments lack the user avatar
    • make user avatars easy to use
    • cancel button under comment input is sometimes unuseful
  • have the same button order everywhere (save / cancel or cancel / save)
  • "This page hasn't been tagged yet"
  • hide the comment & attachments tabs for some system pages
    • add checkboxes to a page to define whether comments should be displayed or not
  • breadcrumb is hard to see
  • space / page vs parent / child relationship is inconsistent in the tree
    • parent / child relationship is useful in the breadcrumb
    • nested spaces?
    • some links are towards children pages while some other are towards reference pages (you leave the current context)
    • some pages might need to have more than one parent (EMC)
    • see a document in the context of the parent where it is currently located (stuff with links)
  • google search appliance RSS feed