Hi Bryn,
Thanks for your feedback, lots of good points. See below for a point by point
comment.
> On 14 May 2016, at 00:47, Bryn Jeffries wrote:
>
> Useful comparisons, but I wasn't sure who the expected reader would be.
I’ve just sent another email explaining more the context and the reason for
this initiative.
> The XWiki vs Confluence comparison feels rather biased so wouldn't be very
> helpful to someone trying to make a rational decision.
The goal is of course to be as unbiased as possible although it’s never fully
possible to do so. At least we need to find out the parts that are not correct
and remove them or word them better. The goal is to highlight the strengths of
XWiki vs Confluence and MediaWiki.
> The table makes them seem identical (perhaps it would be useful to highlight
> the actual differences) aside from license.
I agree that I’m not sure we need to list the stuff that are similar and maybe
it would be better to only mention the differences. Now that said, I think the
idea is also for neophytes to wikis to be able to understand this page. We need
to decide which we wish to have.
> Both are listed as having a ticketing plugin, but last time I checked
> (admittedly over a year ago) I couldn't find a robust plugin anywhere close
> to Confluence's offerings.
You seem to be knowing Confluence which is great, since it’s been more than 10
years that I haven’t used it myself.
Indeed, I don’t know why there’s this "Ticket plugin” mentioned. I’ll check
with Caty. XWiki certainly doesn’t have a full ticket extension right now
AFAIK. The
closest I can think of is the Task Application:
http://extensions.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Extension/Task+Manager+Application
> The extensions in XWiki really vary in quality, whereas Confluence has a lot
> of very polished plugins. That's at least been my experience, and I think
> there's a need to distinguish between high-quality maintained extensions vs.
> the more hacky ones.
Definitely. I’ve also discussed this with others and it’s time that we start
curating extensions and introduce some “Editor Picks” or “Recommended”
extensions. I’ll start this in another thread real soon.
> The lack of a markup editor in Confluence is a big difference. Might be worth
> illustrating further.
Agreed. Maybe the polyglotism too (ability to use various markup syntaxes).
> I think the page hierarchy model is rather difference. Confluence makes
> chaining of child pages very easy, and access restrictions to child pages is
> simple to manage. XWiki was a bit clunky by comparison, but that was for 7.1
> and maybe the addition of sub-spaces in more recent versions makes this
> easier to manage.
Could you explain why it’s simpler with Confluence by comparison with, say,
XWiki 7.4.3? I think this now at least as easy if not more now. Same for access
restrictions to children pages.
See http://platform.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Features/ContentOrganization
> The other big difference, to me, is in documentation. XWiki has changed a lot
> over the years, particularly in the API,
This is not fully correct. A lot of new APIs have been introduced, showing the
dynamism of the XWiki community indeed. However, we take very seriously
backward-compatibility (so seriously that breaking it fails our build
automatically ;)). So all that worked are still supposed to work. Do you have
an example that you’ve noticed where it’s not true (it can happen from time to
time when we conscientiously decide to break a recent API that we think nobody
uses) .
> and a lot of the material discoverable on the web is out of date.
Any example? That would help to fix them.
> My perception is that Confluence's API has been more stable over successive
> releases and more effort has been invested in keeping documentation up to
> date.
It’s certainly true that we need to improve on dev documentation (the user doc
is probably ok but the dev one can be improved).
> Much of this difference is just a natural outcome of the proprietary vs. open
> source backgrounds of each system.
Well our goal is to be open source and still be good on all fronts! :)
Re Confluence, they have lots of people working on the doc vs XWiki where it’s
the developers doing it, so it’s more a question of manpower than of
proprietary vs open source IMO.
What’s interesting though XWiki is a smaller team, we’re still progressing and
innovative at least as fast (if not more) as Confluence IMO. Lots of people
have commented that they prefer XWiki over Confluence. Some quotes are on
https://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/References/Testimonials
Anyway, let’s focus on editing this comparison page to make it as accurate as
possible. Keep the comments coming and feel free to edit the doc too if you
wish.
Thanks
-Vincent
> -Original Message-
>> From: Ecaterina Moraru (Valica) [mailto:vali...@gmail.com]
>> Sent: Saturday, 14 May 2016 1:05 AM
>> To: XWiki Mailinglist; XWiki Mailingli
