When I try to create an app with the app within minutes application, I can complete the first couple steps, but then it skips the last couple when i hit next step. First off, it seems weird that it only has 2 applications in here
But I digress, I try to create the app as instructed in the tutorial where it says to make a FAQ app. So i name it, put a long text field in as instructed, then I hit next step
Hi! What version are you using? Do you have large customizations on your instance?
As far as I can see, the UI does look quite a bit different from XWiki Standard (Flamingo Skin + FA4 iconTheme + Iceberg Colortheme), so this bug might be caused by something you changed (maybe you removed an important page/object for AWM?).
it looks a bit different than yours for sure, not too much though. But yeah, I had very little coding experience when I started this and to be honest xwiki has so much documentation and nuances to it that are not explained very well that I have had to reinstall at least 10 times. So I very well could be missing a page or something that would make things work more smoothly but I have no idea how to determine that.
Edit: worth noting that I just reinstalled the app within minutes trying to fix it before I made this post and nothing changed. If it was a crucial file or page missing you would think that would get addressed with a reinstall of the app.
I can give my feedback as an inexperienced user, but I figured xwiki just isn’t really meant to be run by inexperienced users. I manage to keep it running with extensive ai assistance, which comes with a host of other problems, but I’d be happy to outline stuff thats gotten me extremely confused through my setup.
The WAR installation and how it functions in relation to the directory. I had no idea that having the WAR in the same location as the directory it unpacks to results in it auto exploding and overwriting my working live directory. I had this happen multiple times with it sometimes just erasing my working directory when I tried to move the old WAR (because I didn’t stop tomcat first). That whole interaction is not very well explained and is overall just very confusing.
The fact that there is so many different directories. I have my war directory in /opt/tomcat10/webapps/ROOT/WEB-INF, I dont even remember why i had to do it in root or if thats normal. My permanent directory in /var/lib/xwiki/data i think, then my database, and im still not even sure where my attachments are stored. i think in /var/lib/xwiki/data/store/file/xwiki but they are all hashed and its just not clear.
the whole sheets / classes / bindings / sheetclassbindings etc. I didn’t think I needed to know anything about them if I wasn’t creating stuff myself, but it turns out they can get easily moved or renamed or deleted or out of place or whatever. With this app within minutes for example i found out last night that my livetabletemplate:
was wrong, when i was on it before it said it had been moved or renamed so it may not work properly, but in the history it said it was the only iteration of that page, so I have no idea what moved it or renamed it. So then I changed the version to the only other option at the time which was
bin/view/AppWithinMinutes/LiveTableTemplate?rev=xar%3Aorg.xwiki.platform%3Axwiki-platform-appwithinminutes-ui%2F17.4.0) coming from extension App Within Minutes Application 17.4.0
Which also isn’t clear. It makes it sound like that’s the default I assume, so it would be resetting it. But doing that somehow changed my whole main app within minutes page to
So now it doesn’t even have the button to create the apps or anything, even though the livetable page looks correct now, or at least isn’t showing errors like before. And apparently uninstalling an extension and reinstalling doesn’t set extensions to default working states either? I read that I would have to delete every page associated with the extension or something for it to fully reinstall cleanly. I already reinstalled app within minutes and it didnt fix anything.
Also the extension manager isn’t very well explained. the documentation is very confusing and I dont know how to test to see if mine is even working correctly. Sometimes extensions disappear when i click on more details or try to install them, saying they aren’t found or something when they were clearly showing, and I feel like I can search for extensions on the xwiki site and find way more than what shows up when I search for them.
I’m slowly learning some of the nuances there is just a lot of stuff like this that I feel like isn’t very well explained or is maybe just too technical for me to be able to grasp. And it all seems subjective and dependent on what kind of install I have. Some stuff is entirely different because I’m behind a reverse proxy using nginx, so I’m not even sure what stuff applies to me or changes because of that.
If you don’t see them, it probably means you’ve removed them… (and broken the Help application ;)).
If you see the 2 entries shown above, then it means your wiki has been modified to add these 2 entries… either directly by you or by one or several extensions you’ve installed.
Not sure this helps much. The only way to help is to understand what the following means precisely:
If you can list exactly what you did and what you couldn’t find or understand in the documentation, then we could work to improve it.
Not necessarily. You could have modified/removed pages or files that belonged to the default installation and that could have an impact on any extension.
Depends what you mean by “run”. You mean as a system admin? or as a user? As a user it’s meant to be used by novice users for sure. As system admin, it depends what distribution you’re using but yes it does need a minium of knowmedge. For example, using the docker distribution but not understanding docker isn’t going to cut it. Similarly using the WAR distribution not knowing what a WAR is (ie not know the java servlet model) or not knowing how to install Java isn’t going to cut it.
But you only need really basic knowledge to install XWiki.
First: What does that have to do with XWiki? We don’t even tell you what tool to extract the WAR because if you don’t have this type of knowledge, you’re probably not the right person. We do say to always backup before you upgrade through
Second: it’s not going to overwrite your working live dir if the version is not the same.
Third: we do say that the WAR distribution is the most technical one and it’s the last one we recommend, yet you seem to pick it…
Last, you could manually deploy XWiki as a WAR into the Servlet Container of your choice and on the Database of your choice, if the previous methods were not good enough for your needs. Beware that this requires some technical knowledge about Servlet Container and Databases:
It’s not required. You decided to use ROOT, probably to not have xwiki in the URL.
Well you must have renamed it… It’s not going to move by itself…
It seems you’re doing complex things (like reverting a technical page to an older version), moving technical pages, without understanding what you’re doing. So indeed you’re creating a mess for the AWM app (putting it in an inconsistent state).
So indeed, XWiki offers a lot of power but you need to understand what you’re doing when you start using coding features. If you stay on the non-coding features (like using AWM without bringing changes to the resulting app), then you’ll be fine.
We’ve started putting warning in places where it’s dangerous to do stuff (like when editing technical pages). Maybe we need to do one step further and completely prevent “simple” users from doing any action that could be dangerous at the expense of removing features for them?
We’d need more details. One thing that could happen is if your connection to nexus.xwiki.org isn’t working (or if nexus.xwiki.org is not responding momentarily).
What is confusing in the doc of the Extension Manager specifically?
Tell us when it’s the case so that we can improve the doc.
Provided your reverse proxy config is good, that shouldn’t have any impact on the rest.
Of course we’re trying to make XWiki as simple as possible to use. It’s open source and free and the community is open to tell everybody help in exchange. As mentioned already, as you gain experience, feel free to improve the documentation to explain things in a better way. You can even open Change Request on xwiki.org so that your changes will be reviewed before being pushed.
