Hi Devs, first of all I'd like to congratulate everyone who worked on the latest 7.x releases. I tried a 7.4 snapshot locally and it's looking great! The interface feels much simpler and fresher overall, well done!
Nested spaces bring about a significant change in the way information is stored and organized in XWiki. They make it less necessary to create sub-wikis to compartmentalise information. Besides, at the moment a sub-wiki is almost exactly the same as the main wiki upon creation. I've been doing plenty of demos of XWiki 7.4 at a conference last week and it was difficult to explain the difference between the main wiki and a sub-wiki. Therefore, I would like to suggest the following changes: 1. *View the main wiki as a collaborative content repository* (what a wiki is most often associated with). Therefore the main wiki would have the most wiki-like features (treeview and tagcloud in a pane on the left) and global activity stream on the home page. Users looking for a "simple" wiki wouldn't even need to create sub-wikis. 2. *View subwikis as collaborative workspaces* (created for a project or another type of shorter-lived initiative). A subwiki would retain the appbar on the left, as well as panels on the right that are specific to each app (ex: forum app, blog app...). The homepage would be made of widgets surfacing information from the various apps installed. Additional subwiki templates could be added later on, once flavors are built into the product. 3. *Add the horizontal menu to the standard install.* In addition to this, an entry should be added to the menu to automatically list existing sub-wikis the user has access to. This would make navigation between wikis more discoverable and easier to use. My feeling is that these changes would make the distinction between nested spaces and sub-wikis much easier to explain and understand for users: - *Want to share generic information? Put it in the right location in the main wiki.* - *Want to work with others on a restricted project? Create a sub-wiki for this purpose.* With the addition of the horizontal menu, the main wiki would act as both a portal to information and a knowledge repository. Looking forward to your feedback, Guillaume _______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs
