A few days ago, I was complaining on twitter about the usability of the blog interface in XWiki and Vincent suggested that I send my observations to this list, so here goes...
I've been using the XWiki blog for a few months (we have an installation of 1.4-MILESTONE-2.9478, but my notes apply to the 1.5 version I just downloaded and tried) and a few annoyances have bubbled up XWiki blog UI notes - When creating a blog entry, there's some help text "page name" in the text input. That should be automatically cleared when I click into the text input field so I don't have to select and delete it myself. The same with the boilerplate helper text in the blog article entry page. - When you have exactly ten articles, you get a "next" link that takes you to to a page with no entries in it. - When you have more than ten articles, the "next" button takes you backwards in time. That's pretty confusing. I would expect the pager link to say something like "earlier entries" and "later entries." When you have quite a few blog entries and you are a few pages in, this can be very confusing. - I often want to see the full index of blog entries so I can easily go to earlier entries. Only having the paged view of blog entries is very difficult to navigate through when there are lots of blog entries. - When I'm reading the blog entries, I would like to expand the full contents inline instead of having to click forward to the single blog entry view. When I'm reading a lot of blog entries at once, or scanning them, or looking for a particular blog entry in a long list, I want to be able to read them within the same page context without being yanked out of the blog entry list UI context. - I would like an out-of-the-box way to segregate blogs other than just by category. I'd like some blog customization features built into the standard wiki UI. - It's very difficult to find the correct RSS URL to subscribe to the blog syndication. It's nearly impossible to figure out how to get the correct RSS URL to subscribe to blog entries of a particular category (I figured it out, but it was a total guess on my part by adding the magic url parameter). I really expect an RSS link on the blog pages. - I still haven't figured out how to make the max number of articles in the RSS feed larger than the default. I was trying to work around the limitations of the standard blog UI and use an RSS reader to get an index of all of the entries, but I couldn't figure out how to get the RSS feed to spit all of them out, since I have more than the max entries. Anyway, those are my observations. I hope they help. Cheers, --Orion _______________________________________________ users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/users
