On Fri, Jun 29, 2012 at 6:18 PM, Vincent Massol <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> 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?
Indeed, such a macro could be useful, +1
Thanks,
Marius
>
> Thanks
> -Vincent
>
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