On Jun 29, 2012, at 4:57 PM, Marius Dumitru Florea wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 29, 2012 at 4:45 PM, Vincent Massol <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>> 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.
>
> Most of the time the user wants to add a gadget to the dashboard, not
> to create one.
Indeed, good point.
It's not the case here but it's probably the major use case, even though we
don't yet have any real gadget to use… Macros are not really Gadgets. Macros
are reusable building blocks while gadgets are supposed to do something
specific display stuff nicely,etc. We have a few macros that can act as gadgets
like the {{document}} macro or {{activity}} for ex.
We discussed in the past having a "Gadget" content type but we didn't conclude
and it's a bit awkward.
The problem right now is that users get to see all macros that exist, even
complex and technical ones rather than see upfront a selected list of nice
macro/gadget to use for a dashboard.
> And 'add' implies selecting a gadget from a list. I'm
> not sure that displaying a WYSIWYG editor (rich text area) when
> clicking the "Add Gadget" will make things more clear. The user will
> probably ask herself "What now?". Is she going to know that a 'gadget'
> is a macro?
Yes you're right. This is more a use case for creating a new widget.
BTW right now we cannot edit a gadget that doesn't use a macro as its top
content. You get an error popup when you try this, telling you to use the
object editor. At some point it would be nice to fix this.
> Keeping the list of gadgets and having a special one whose
> content is editable with the WYSIWYG editor seems to me as the best
> solution. Now, displaying the WYSIWYG editor for the content of this
> special gadget might require some hacks.
Yes. It's the same topic as the "macro-specific editor" topic, which is a
complex one.
Just got an idea. What I didn't like was to have a {{text}} macro that has no
meaning when used outside of the dashboard but I think we can reconcile the
best of both worlds since there's a macro we've been wanting to have for some
time to allow to write markup in any markup language.
So we could call it {{content}} and it could have an optional parameter called
"syntax" to specify the syntax of its content; if not specified it would
default to the syntax of the current doc in which it is put.
So full form would be {{content syntax="xwiki/2.1"}}….{{/content}}.
WDYT?
Thanks
-Vincent
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