On Jun 29, 2012, at 3:32 PM, Guillaume Lerouge wrote: > Hi Caty, > > On Fri, Jun 29, 2012 at 3:10 PM, Vincent Massol <[email protected]> wrote: > >> >> On Jun 29, 2012, at 3:00 PM, Ecaterina Moraru (Valica) wrote: >> >>> Hi, >>> >>> I have received numerous complains that simple users have problems in >>> editing the content and title of the Welcome block ("Welcome to you wiki" >>> gadget) from the homepage. >>> There are multiple factors that influence the editing of that particular >>> gadget and that make the job especially harder for beginners. >>> >>> One of these factors is that the gadget used to display the Welcome >> content >>> is an "include" gadget. Without some custom actions for the gadget that >>> would let the user navigate to the included page or without some >>> auto-redirect mechanism, the simple users have difficulties in >>> understanding where the welcome content is coming from and what actions >>> they need to do in order to edit that content. >>> Also the "include" macro has a lot of advanced properties that can be >> scary >>> and confusing for users (context, reference, section, type, etc.). >>> >>> My proposal is to create a new "text" gadget. This gadget will be >> very-very >>> simple and will contain just the gadget's title and the gadget's content. >>> Its only purpose will be to let users add textual information inside a >>> dashboard. >>> >> http://incubator.myxwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Improvements/EditingWelcomeMessage#HProposal >> > > I was thinking about the exact same idea after doing a demo yesterday :-) > > >>> Right now we have specialized gadgets for HTML content, velocity content, >>> code in general, boxes, success messages, etc. but no way to put just a >>> simple text inside the dashboard. >> >> Indeed when editing the dashboard we should be able to not use a gadget >> and instead type directly the content in wysiwyg mode. >> >> I don't think we should have a "text" macro though. >> > > It's the fastest way to solve the issue at hand, with the lowest overhead. > Caty, you could even offer it right away as an extension on > extensions.xwiki.org , you simply need to create a wiki macro. We could > call it "gadget text" if that makes you feel better. > > One idea is that the Add gadget button should open a custom Gadget dialog >> box that allows to specify the title and for the content it should display >> the WYSIWYG editor, thus allowing to insert macros like for any content. >> > > This means changing the existing dashboard architecture which is going to > take ages, with nobody assigned to it right now. Caty's solution is both > faster and simpler. > > I'm +1!
IMO the strategy should always be the same (whatever the topic): 1) Agree about where we want to go 2) Decide how to get there 3) Possibly decide about creating temporary technical debt because 1) would take too long and the feature/issue is needed quickly What's wrong is to jump to 3) without thinking about 1) because: * you may be making incompatible choices * it's very very difficult to remove something * 1) might not be that hard Also having that macro on e.x.o is not going to help at all. No users is going to look for it and install it before editing his/her dashboard. IMO what's not nice is how we hijacked the Macro editor. It makes it unnecessarily complex for the user. If instead we present the user with the standard WYSIWYG editor and the same ability as he already knows about to add content it'll be much more effective. It shouldn't be complex since we already have all the pieces. Since I've not been close to this code I'm curious to get feedback from Anca and Marius about the idea and the time it would take to achieve it. Thanks -Vincent _______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs
