Hi Caty,
Nice thoughts, see below.
On Jun 14, 2012, at 8:13 PM, Ecaterina Moraru (Valica) wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I want to list some ideas about Extension Manager that come to my mind. I'm
> sure others thought about them already or will find the time to make some
> other suggestions:
>
> 1) Filtering core extensions
> Would be nice to be able to view preinstalled applications with EM.
> Right now everything that comes preinstalled is found inside 'Core
> extensions'.
>
> There are a lot of technical extensions, but there are also some extensions
> that could be of general knowledge. For example it would be nice to see
> what functionality a default wiki has in terms of applications and macros
> (even nicer if we think about future flavored packages). This would allow
> the administrator to quickly scan and customize the tools at his disposal.
>
> Maybe it would be interesting to have some filtering functionality.
> This way I could filter for applications and see that I have preinstalled
> 'Activity Stream', 'Annotations', 'Search', 'WYSIWYG', 'Message Stream',
> etc. and if I filter for macros I could get 'Chart macro', 'Box macro',
> 'Display macro', 'Message macro', etc.
An idea we have discussed at length is to have no extension installed initially
and ask the user to pick a flavor (i.e a preset selection of extensions) or
manually check extensions to be installed.
> 2) Enable/Disable applications from inside EM
> Another idea is for the EM to sustain enable/disable actions for
> installed/core applications/macros. Right now applications like
> 'Annotations', 'Search Suggest', 'Message Stream', even 'OpenOffice Server'
> have special settings that permit to enable ('activate') them. This
> functionality could be covered by the EM and not display anymore special
> administration sections for each applications.
Yep, the EM already support the notion of "downloaded extension" vs 'installed
extension'. It would be nice that the UI makes the distinction too.
And indeed we should refactor the application-specific disable features to use
the EM "disable" feature instead.
> 3) Integrate application configuration inside EM
> If EM will manage installed applications and would also allow the
> enabling/disabling part, than is normal that the application configuration
> should be made also from inside the EM and not as a separate Administration
> component.
I don't understand this one. It's up to each app to provide its own
configuration and implement Admin UI extension points.
> Although all things in XWiki are extensions and components, we would need
> to get along what the lightest version of xwiki would contain (in terms of
> functionality and not components). For this default functionalities (Users,
> Rights, Localization, Presentation, Import/Export, etc.) the Administration
> sections would be still used, since they could be considered core elements
> and not something that can be disabled or uninstalled.
I don't think this is necessarily true. It really depends on the use case
needed by the user. Eventually almost everything should be able to
disabled/enabled. Now some extension require other extensions to be active to
work so disabling an extension would also disable extensions using it if it's a
necessary dependency (ie not optional).
> Maybe all the thoughts I am writing here could also be solved if we rewrite
> some functionality like 'Activity Stream', 'Annotations', some macros, etc.
> and not display them anymore as 'Core Extensions' but rather as 'Installed
> Extensions'.
Yep, exactly. That's what Thomas is working on for 4.2M1 AFAIK.
Thanks
-Vincent
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