Hello XWiki users,
I’d like to know if you’re using the Dashboard feature of XWiki. I have several questions for you:
Your answers will help us improve XWiki further.
Thanks!
No.
Pages I see in the navigation panel. Activities are listed in notifications for all pages or spaces I‘m interested in. The tag cloud never had any use to me. I use tags to enhance search results but not to see what is „hot“ these days.
No, I’m not using Dashboard at all, even example of my personal account on xwiki.org. I haven’t tried customizing it before reading this post. There may be some useful macros or gadgets available, but I’m not very familiar with them yet, and I’m not sure what kind of information or output I’d want to have in such profile section.
P.S. I tried searching among macros, but I don’t see anything really worth using.
There are plenty of useful stuff to do in a dashboard but it depends what you use your wiki for. For example if you develop a product you could have a dashboard about the progress, using the jira macro, list the release notes, display the last blog posts, etc.
True, but taking into account that I know exact document reference to release notes and latest blogs, I’ll use quick search to jump to that place.
Perhaps the usage and customization part of Dashboard section of the user profile could be part of Guided Tutorial Extension Proposal #1
I don’t personally use the Dashboard feature.
I’m aware it exists, and I looked into it at some point, but it doesn’t fit into my workflow.
I prefer having dedicated pages for the stuff that could be added into the Dashboard.
The main point of a dashboard is to have a quick global view of something. See for example Loading... for a dashboard of release 17.10.8 of XWiki. All the info on that page can be found in other places (provided you spend a bit of time). It’s the same for XWiki. For ex, if you want to display some blog posts in a dashboard you may not want to display all blog posts but only some in a given category, same for release notes and for the jira macro you won’t find it on other pages (to continue with the example I gave).
I personally think there’s value in a Dashboard feature but what I find hard is to define a default dashboard that brings value OOB without users configuring it. And it seems that for some reason, the users who replied to this thread didn’t customize it.
From what I’m hearing so far, the shared Dashboard feature could maybe be less visible. We could imagine the following:
FTR on xwiki.org we don’t use it at https://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/News but we could (it’s just that since we’re advanced users we’ve used the container macro instead but I think it would make sense to use a dashboard there).
There are users in our wiki that wanted to know what is the most read page in their space or who are the last editors of “their” pages/spaces that didn’t got an update for a year. Some of our users are interested in statistics. That could be a use case for a dashboard.
But because those numbers aren’t counted in default xwiki (and I’m very happy about that) there is no reason for a dashboard like this.
Note: This one should be easy to do with a query (no need for a stats app).
Do you use the default Dashboard as is?
Yes, I did not hide or uninstall the Dashboard page. The only thing I disabled is the RSS feed button for the activity stream because I did not see a need for that in a knowledge base. It felt rather outdated for my use case and there is not much “interesting” happening that I would see anyone subscribing to to stay always up-to-date 
But I wish I could use it to better, e.g. get some useful insights. Tried it as the wiki startpage for a while, reverted that later.
Do you have ideas to improve the default dashboard content (e.g. I have the feeling that listing pages is not interesting since there’s the nav panel + the Page Index already)?
I agree that listing pages there seems rather redundant and boring.
So far I did not need that tag cloud either. Tags can be interesting for finding/categorizing pages but I do not need to a “heat map” of tagged pages.
I cannot think of anything useful I would do with a Dashboard. I would rather make it a page with facts/statistics/“fun facts” that do not add much actually useful things. So basically like @Simpel mentioned. I like it being functional.
I would invest more effort in clearing up the activity stream. I saw several events there that I thought should be filtered by the option to not show system notifications. In my case this was mostly caused by account creation, group synchronization and edits to AuthService.Configuration (OIDC login extension). The activity stream is the main catch for me where users can see what is happening in the wiki. Imo this should not be too granular or technical and to provide a good overview. Users should always be able to open the pages they see there to check out.
Do you use custom Dashboards or modify the default Dashboard?
I ended up editing the default startpage to be more like a landing page welcoming the user. I think I would not use the Dashboard as a default startpage again.
Yes I know. Thank you.
This wish from our users isn’t useful at all. When I move/rename a page where their article is linking too - suddenly I’m the last editor of their article. They don’t understand that a name presented as “modified by” could have been nothing to do with their article at all.
It wasn’t the best example to give.