On Wed, Dec 28, 2016 at 1:00 PM, Dung Hoang <zm.hwng@zoho.com> wrote:

Hi everyone,

I recently tried to install a few applications onto my XWiki 8.4.2 instance, some of them (namely, Idea Application & Task Application) get this strange error whenever I tried to click Edit and just click Next to explorer the feature: the main screen will display some kind of exception about velocity macro and Space (I am sure you can reproduce this to see the details).

I fixed the error with http://jira.xwiki.org/browse/XWIKI-13942 .

Also, in the Application left navigation, application name will change to some kind of id/reference (e.g. ideas.app.title, TaskManager.panels.name). So, I have a few questions:

That's because these applications are not meant to be edited using the App Within Minutes ( http://extensions.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Extension/App+Within+Minutes+Appl... ) wizard. They were generated using App Within Minutes and they were customized afterwards so editing them using the application wizard will overwrite all those customizations, thus breaking them.

1. It doesn't seem natural to me that a user with role of normal user can Edit an Application. So what does it mean by "Editing an Application"? And why would it be normal to allow a user (non-admin) to edit an Application?

For me the right to edit an application and the right to administer the wiki are separate things. You may have an "AppDevs" group that is allowed to edit the applications and which is not allowed to administer the wiki. You are free to setup the access rights as you want. If you want to prevent simple users from editing the application then restrict the edit right on the application class (see http://extensions.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Extension/App+Within+Minutes+Appl... ). I agree though that the Ideas and Task Applications could restrict the edit right to the admin group by default. You should report an issue.

2. I am guessing Editing an application is some kind of administrative activities. If so, is there any documentation regarding Applications administration in XWiki? I found this: http://platform.xwiki.org/ xwiki/bin/view/Features/Applications? but it covers only Installing and (a bit of) Usage. It references other documentation for Development of Application or XWiki itself but not administration.

An application is basically a set of wiki pages that you either create yourself or you use the App Within Minutes wizard to create the pages for your. See http://platform.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/DevGuide/FAQTutorial . The "application editing" action you tried to use is specific to App Within Minutes. Hope this helps, Marius

Thanks,

Zoom