Good points. It seems to me we have two major audiences: geeky and non-geeky.
The geeky would probably understand versioning and appreciate the desire to reduce intermediate versions. They would probably not be put off by an extra button or checkbox. The non-geeky would prefer the "click here to save your stuff" approach. Given the differences in expectations, is it reasonable to produce a single UI that satisfies both? Two UI approaches presented so far: 1. extra button/checkbox 2. wiki preference with a timeout between major/minor versions Being a geeky person, I prefer the former because the latter hides application behavior. I can imagine saving a page with lots of changes only to find that a major version was not created. The additional requirement you implicitly added was that it not require a deep understanding of how the wiki stores stuff (i.e. versions). The solution that comes to my mind is to provide everything: a Save button that operates based on the server preference, and some additional buttons "Save New Version", "Save Over Old Version", and "Save and Continue Editing" (which doesn't create a new version). These additional buttons could be hidden under a sliding division similar to the Edit Assist panel in the plain text editor (I'm looking at v2.6.3 here). The non-geeky people see one button and the geeky people (if they care to show them) see lots of options. -- Bobman On Wed, Apr 8, 2009 at 6:46 AM, Janne Jalkanen <[email protected]>wrote: > > let's then keep the discussions there, another option might be to have > one > > save button, but with an additional "dont make new version" check-box, > whose > > setting is kept in the cookie ? > > I fear that that is a bit too confusing too (it's not the button, it's > the fact that you don't encounter such options in any other software, > and it requires a rather deep understanding of how Wiki stores stuff > to grasp that idea. It's essentially simply too geeky and I would > like to avoid that if possible.) I would rather look at what is it > that the functionality is trying to achieve, what the user > expectations are, and then try to figure out a better way to do > achieve the same. > > I think JSPWiki interface is way too confusing, arcane and geeky > already. We should strive to make it leaner, meaner and cleaner. > > /Janne >
