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