> BTW, I'd be interested to know how you found about XWiki and what are your
> impressions about it (besides its user guide... :-)
I first discovered XWiki two years ago and it seemed a bit raw, I was
looking for a corporate wiki and the features proposed fit my needs
but the interface and user experience wasn't what I was looking for.
I came back to XWiki a few weeks ago after having tested TWiki for
quite a long time and Deki Wiki for a shorter period. I was quite
amazed by the huge step forward XWiki had done. The company I work for
(Andalusian Ministry of Economic and Finance) is looking for a
corporate wiki for IT and possibly non-IT personal. We have strong
technical requisite: Java platform and Oracle database since it would
ease administration a lot. XWiki is nearly the only competitor in the
field.
As for feedback: first things first, XWiki is a really nice piece of
software with very promising possibilities. Technically speaking it is
hard to peep, it certainly is a nice playground for developers. As for
user experience, all the wiki features one might need are offered but
I think there is room for improvements on the ease of use.
For what I could test, not a lot really, I find the WYSIWYG editor
inconsistent, and I think it's a big problem, if you edit a page and
then saves it various times without changing anything it sometimes
comes up with new line breaks or style markups that often break
formats or tables. It's annoying and will repel new wiki users. I saw
you're working on a new editor based on GWT, I hope that will help. To
add my two cents to the reflexion I would prevent the addition of
"markups" (everything between {}) from the editor. Just limit it to
strict wiki syntax, nothing else. TWiki works like this and it's
great, you always have a consistency between wiki edition and WYSIWYG
edition, this is not the case in XWiki (according to my experience).
Some users prefer wiki syntax, some WYSIWYG, what happens if they edit
the same page? For example, you have a font size option in the editor,
it really should be removed by default, it inserts {style} markups
that messes up the wiki syntax (since there is no wiki syntax for font
size). Moreover this option is quite useless since font size doesn't
matter with css and font size control in the browser, what matters is
the relative font size not the absolute value. You use headers and
special css styles to emphasize text, not fixed size. The Deki Wiki
way of doing things is different: they don't have wiki syntax, you
always have the editor and the pages are stored in xml. It's a nice
solution too.
As I said before some features are too complicated, forms and template
for example. TWiki and Deki Wiki have dead simple mechanisms to make
templates. I think it's because they're slightly different. XWiki
templates allows you to create custom page structure while TWiki and
Deki templates allows you to create pages with pre-filled content to
complete. How can I do this in XWiki?
Forms seems too complicated, I didn't try hard I must say, but I don't
think they're wiki friendly. You have to manage dev jargon like
classes and properties. TWiki forms work with a regular table in a
wiki page. It's really easy to use and there's no need to learn
anything new.
To resume I think XWiki is a bit to dev oriented, it should care more
about the end user and provide him with dead simple mechanisms for
features that just work. Less fancy tech stuff and more pragmatic end
user experience. Wiki adoption comes because wiki is simple and fun,
not because you can embed Java code directly in pages (although the
dev guys here love it).
*I repeat, this is a first impression, I might be totally wrong.*
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