Re: [xwiki-users] Request: make linking easy
On 26 Nov 2015 at 20:28:59, Anton Hughes (ah@tradeworks.io(mailto:ah@tradeworks.io)) wrote:
On 26 November 2015 at 20:18, vincent@massol.net(mailto:vincent@massol.net) wrote:
[[MyExamplePage]] works in XWiki too :)
This is so simple that anyone can do it!
Why don’t you try it on xwiki? I have - and it doesnt work on XWiki. That is why I took the time to write about this.
It works. Create a page with [[test]]. You’ll see a question mark (wanted link). Click on it, add content and save. Navigate back to your first page. The link works. What you’re showing in the screenshots is orange and apples. In one link you link to a new page called MyExamplePage. And in the second one you link to a page named MyExamplePage.WebHome. In Mediawiki try create a page2 that exists (and a page1 that doesn’t). Then write in another page: [[page1]] [[page2]] You’ll get the same result. Thanks -Vincent
Anton Hughes
On 26 November 2015 at 20:33, vincent@massol.net <vincent@massol.net> wrote:
It works. Create a page with [[test]]. You’ll see a question mark (wanted link). Click on it, add content and save. Navigate back to your first page. The link works.
What you’re showing in the screenshots is orange and apples. In one link you link to a new page called MyExamplePage. And in the second one you link to a page named MyExamplePage.WebHome.
In Mediawiki try create a page2 that exists (and a page1 that doesn’t). Then write in another page:
Youre missing my point. I'm trying to point out how difficult it is, without prior knowledge, to do just a simple link. You answer by giving me links to all sorts of docs. As I tried to illustrate, I have already created a page called MyExamplePage. Writing [[MyExamplePage]] does NOT link to it. To correctly link to it need to study documentation, and write a lot more. The correct link is [[MyExamplePage>>doc:MyExamplePage.WebHome]] This is not easy. This is not natural. This does not help collaboration. This does require studying documentation. Obviously for you, who use this product everyday, you think Im just complaining about nothing. But, dont take my word - just ask any normal user what ' [[MyExamplePage>>doc:MyExamplePage.WebHome]]' means. No one in my office has a clue. A wiki is about making things simple for everyday users - but you are a heavy duty technical user. Xwiki has taken the concept of wiki and made it brittle and technical. -- Anton Hughes
Hi Anton, Sorry to hear you are having such difficulties with XWiki. Even so, it`s interesting to hear other opinions. Regarding your particular issue with the link syntax... TL;DR Try "[[MyExamplePage.WebHome]]". That should work out nicely for what you want. Detailed answer... You say you have just created the document "MyExamplePage". However, since you are probably using the 7.2+ UI, with the shift to Nested Pages, you have probably actually created the page "MyExamplePage.WebHome" (unless you've checked "Terminal Page" as an advanced user, which I doubt you did). At this point, you should have a look at this page [1]. When you are using WYSIWYG to add a link by using the nice wizards, we have tried (a lot actually) to make the transition to Nested Pages transparent to users (both in the previous creation step and in the WYSIWYG editor) so that regular users are not exposed to the technical/implementation detail which is the "WebHome" part. Everywhere they look, users see document titles instead of the document name "WebHome". While still in WYSIWYG, the editor might produce an overly explicit wiki syntax in the document's content, and, if you study the XWiki Syntax page, you will see that all the information you mentioned is not really needed. It is either a slightly overly explicit WYSIWYG thing but probably also mixed with the input you`ve provided to the link wizard. 1. [[MyExamplePage>>doc:MyExamplePage.WebHome]] is broken into [[label>>type:reference]]. 2. In your case label and document name (actually space name) is the same, so this is perfectly equivalent with: [[doc:MyExamplePage.WebHome]] 3. Now the "doc:" part is default, AFAIK, so this is why I mentioned an overly explicit WYSIWYG editor... this means that, in the end, your like is actually [[MyExamplePage.WebHome]]. 4. The only issue left at this stage is the "WebHome" part, which, as mentioned (and we are trying to make it well understood), is an implementation/migration/historical detail of the Nested Pages approach that we are pushing for since 7.2. Please keep in mind that XWiki is around for almost 13 years now and it has evolved a lot, but never without its growing pains. ATM, this is one of them. We are trying our best to make everything transparent to simple users through nice UIs, but when you get down to wiki syntax, macro parameters, includes, application development, etc, you need to be an intermediate/advanced user and to also be aware of these technical aspects. In the current model, a page reference has a "wiki" field, a "space" path field and a page "name" field. Our solution within the current model to implement Nested Pages was to make the real page name part of the space path (as last element) and, for the page "name" field, always user "WebHome". In the pre 7.2 way of presenting things, this would look like we are always creating spaces instead of pages, since (terminal) pages lack flexibility, i.e. can no have child pages of their own. Probably the next evolution step would be to drop the page "name" field altogether and just keep the "path" field, which would remove the need for the "WebHome" hack and would move more towards a "node"-based model. An even further evolution step would be to maybe transform that path into an unique ID for the page (which would not necessarily need to be a path), something that would allow us to go to a parent-child based Nested Documents implementation [2]. Anyway, it's an iterative process and, at every step, we need to preserve backwards compatibility with previous XWiki versions and/or to provide viable and smooth migration processes, otherwise people already using XWiki will not be very happy when they try to upgrade. Hope this helps in understanding what is going on and that it's not really an issue of the syntax, but of the compromise we had to make to be able to expand our model. -Eduard ---------- [1] http://platform.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Features/ContentOrganization [2] http://design.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Proposal/ParentchildUniqueIDNestedDoc... On Thu, Nov 26, 2015 at 9:44 PM, Anton Hughes <ah@tradeworks.io> wrote:
On 26 November 2015 at 20:33, vincent@massol.net <vincent@massol.net> wrote:
It works. Create a page with [[test]]. You’ll see a question mark (wanted link). Click on it, add content and save. Navigate back to your first page. The link works.
What you’re showing in the screenshots is orange and apples. In one link you link to a new page called MyExamplePage. And in the second one you link to a page named MyExamplePage.WebHome.
In Mediawiki try create a page2 that exists (and a page1 that doesn’t). Then write in another page:
Youre missing my point. I'm trying to point out how difficult it is, without prior knowledge, to do just a simple link. You answer by giving me links to all sorts of docs.
As I tried to illustrate, I have already created a page called MyExamplePage. Writing [[MyExamplePage]] does NOT link to it. To correctly link to it need to study documentation, and write a lot more. The correct link is [[MyExamplePage>>doc:MyExamplePage.WebHome]] This is not easy. This is not natural. This does not help collaboration. This does require studying documentation.
Obviously for you, who use this product everyday, you think Im just complaining about nothing. But, dont take my word - just ask any normal user what ' [[MyExamplePage>>doc:MyExamplePage.WebHome]]' means. No one in my office has a clue. A wiki is about making things simple for everyday users - but you are a heavy duty technical user. Xwiki has taken the concept of wiki and made it brittle and technical.
-- Anton Hughes _______________________________________________ users mailing list users@xwiki.org http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/users
Hi Anton, On 26 Nov 2015 at 20:44:35, Anton Hughes (ah@tradeworks.io(mailto:ah@tradeworks.io)) wrote:
On 26 November 2015 at 20:33, vincent@massol.net(mailto:vincent@massol.net) wrote:
It works. Create a page with [[test]]. You’ll see a question mark (wanted link). Click on it, add content and save. Navigate back to your first page. The link works.
What you’re showing in the screenshots is orange and apples. In one link you link to a new page called MyExamplePage. And in the second one you link to a page named MyExamplePage.WebHome.
In Mediawiki try create a page2 that exists (and a page1 that doesn’t). Then write in another page: Youre missing my point. I'm trying to point out how difficult it is, without prior knowledge, to do just a simple link. You answer by giving me links to all sorts of docs.
As I tried to illustrate, I have already created a page called MyExamplePage. Writing [[MyExamplePage]] does NOT link to it. To correctly link to it need to study documentation, and write a lot more. The correct link is [[MyExamplePage>>doc:MyExamplePage.WebHome]] This is not easy. This is not natural. This does not help collaboration. This does require studying documentation.
Obviously for you, who use this product everyday, you think Im just complaining about nothing. But, dont take my word - just ask any normal user what ' [[MyExamplePage>>doc:MyExamplePage.WebHome]]' means. No one in my office has a clue. A wiki is about making things simple for everyday users - but you are a heavy duty technical user. Xwiki has taken the concept of wiki and made it brittle and technical.
We exchanged a lot of emails yesterday. Let me try to summarize my position: * I appreciate your feedback a lot, especially as it comes from someone not used to XWiki. This allows to have an external view different from ours which has been forged by years of using and developing XWiki. * We currently have a problem starting with XWiki 7.2. We have a mismatch between the XWiki internal model (which supports subwikis, nested spaces and pages) and our UI in which we’re trying to completely hide the concept of Spaces so that users only see Nested Pages (note that I’ve said Nested Pages and not Nested Spaces). The issue surfaces when you start using wiki links in markup, macros or scripting APIs, which all currently accept a Reference (i.e. subwikis, nested spaces and pages, as in wiki:space1.space2.page). So we map Nested Pages onto Nested Spaces by always creating pages in a page named WebHome and in a space named after the name of the page the user wants to use. * I don’t agree with you that having a single organization namespace is better than supporting hierarchies, and that the MediaWiki model is the best. * The format you mentioned above, i.e. [[MyExamplePage>>doc:MyExamplePage.WebHome]] is the canonical format. You can drop “doc:” (in which case XWiki assumes you reference a doc by default). It’s there because we support lots of various other references: urls, mailto, unc, etc. See the syntax guide for more. * The only complaint I know of (before XWiki 7.2) about the format of our links is that some user would have liked us to use the “/“ separator instead of “.”, e.g. [[label>>space/page]] instead of [[label>>space.page]]. * XWiki supports tags and a Tag UI if you wish to have various views for wiki pages. Note to self: we should add a “tag” parameter to the {{documents/}} macro (http://extensions.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Extension/Documents+Macro) to list all docs with a given tag. * Last, this feature of Nested Spaces and Nested Pages is very new (started in XWiki 7.2 and we’re still tuning it). It’ll take some time more for us to iron out all the wrinkles that result from it. * We’re missing some documentation to explain all this. We’re also missing autocompletion of link references in the wiki editor to make it easy to link to existing pages. Hope it helps. Thanks -Vincent
Anton Hughes
Hi Anton, thanks for your feedback. As you noticed, XWiki is currently undergoing significant changes in the way we handle pages and all the associated kinks have not been worked out yet. If I may, one solution for you could be to switch back to XWiki Enterprise 7.1 for the moment, and upgrade at a later point in time, once things are more stable with regards to nested pages. Regarding the way pages are organized, while I agree that the tree organization can cause confusion for users coming from MediaWiki, the power and flexibility coming with this (cascading rights in particular) would be missed by users going the other way round. Now clearly there are some difficulties coming from the fact that some pages are nested and others aren't (I started a separate thread on this topic). Specifically, the fact that the syntax requires "WebHome" to be explicitly mentioned is annoying and I hope we'll be able to fix it soon. Out of curiosity, since you seem to be familiar with MediaWiki, is there a specific reason why you decided to go with XWiki this time? In any case, thanks for all the feedback! Getting a fresh point of view from newcomers is very valuable, even though we can sometimes react a bit defensively. Best, Guillaume On Friday, 27 November 2015, vincent@massol.net <vincent@massol.net> wrote:
Hi Anton,
On 26 Nov 2015 at 20:44:35, Anton Hughes (ah@tradeworks.io <javascript:;> (mailto:ah@tradeworks.io <javascript:;>)) wrote:
On 26 November 2015 at 20:33, vincent@massol.net <javascript:;>(mailto:
vincent@massol.net <javascript:;>) wrote:
It works. Create a page with [[test]]. You’ll see a question mark (wanted link). Click on it, add content and save. Navigate back to your first page. The link works.
What you’re showing in the screenshots is orange and apples. In one link you link to a new page called MyExamplePage. And in the second one you link to a page named MyExamplePage.WebHome.
In Mediawiki try create a page2 that exists (and a page1 that doesn’t). Then write in another page: Youre missing my point. I'm trying to point out how difficult it is, without prior knowledge, to do just a simple link. You answer by giving me links to all sorts of docs.
As I tried to illustrate, I have already created a page called MyExamplePage. Writing [[MyExamplePage]] does NOT link to it. To correctly link to it need to study documentation, and write a lot more. The correct link is [[MyExamplePage>>doc:MyExamplePage.WebHome]] This is not easy. This is not natural. This does not help collaboration. This does require studying documentation.
Obviously for you, who use this product everyday, you think Im just complaining about nothing. But, dont take my word - just ask any normal user what ' [[MyExamplePage>>doc:MyExamplePage.WebHome]]' means. No one in my office has a clue. A wiki is about making things simple for everyday users - but you are a heavy duty technical user. Xwiki has taken the concept of wiki and made it brittle and technical.
We exchanged a lot of emails yesterday. Let me try to summarize my position:
* I appreciate your feedback a lot, especially as it comes from someone not used to XWiki. This allows to have an external view different from ours which has been forged by years of using and developing XWiki.
* We currently have a problem starting with XWiki 7.2. We have a mismatch between the XWiki internal model (which supports subwikis, nested spaces and pages) and our UI in which we’re trying to completely hide the concept of Spaces so that users only see Nested Pages (note that I’ve said Nested Pages and not Nested Spaces). The issue surfaces when you start using wiki links in markup, macros or scripting APIs, which all currently accept a Reference (i.e. subwikis, nested spaces and pages, as in wiki:space1.space2.page). So we map Nested Pages onto Nested Spaces by always creating pages in a page named WebHome and in a space named after the name of the page the user wants to use.
* I don’t agree with you that having a single organization namespace is better than supporting hierarchies, and that the MediaWiki model is the best.
* The format you mentioned above, i.e. [[MyExamplePage>>doc:MyExamplePage.WebHome]] is the canonical format. You can drop “doc:” (in which case XWiki assumes you reference a doc by default). It’s there because we support lots of various other references: urls, mailto, unc, etc. See the syntax guide for more.
* The only complaint I know of (before XWiki 7.2) about the format of our links is that some user would have liked us to use the “/“ separator instead of “.”, e.g. [[label>>space/page]] instead of [[label>>space.page]].
* XWiki supports tags and a Tag UI if you wish to have various views for wiki pages. Note to self: we should add a “tag” parameter to the {{documents/}} macro ( http://extensions.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Extension/Documents+Macro) to list all docs with a given tag.
* Last, this feature of Nested Spaces and Nested Pages is very new (started in XWiki 7.2 and we’re still tuning it). It’ll take some time more for us to iron out all the wrinkles that result from it.
* We’re missing some documentation to explain all this. We’re also missing autocompletion of link references in the wiki editor to make it easy to link to existing pages.
Hope it helps.
Thanks -Vincent
Anton Hughes
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participants (4)
-
Anton Hughes -
Eduard Moraru -
Guillaume Lerouge -
vincent＠massol.net