"Features" Page Rework Proposal

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Hi everyone! A while ago I started reviewing some of the documentation pages and worked a bit on the Features page.

I wanted to share with you my conclusions and ask for your opinions.

Given that the page is located under the “User Guide” section, I believe that it should be filled with mostly user facing features and information. At the moment, the page also contains quite a bit of content geared towards administrators and developers.

The admin and dev features should still be visible, as some users might have gotten used to finding them on this page. Also, this is one of the first results when you search for “XWiki features”, and these advanced features may be useful to IT managers looking for a knowledge management solution.

Still, less emphasis should be put on admin and dev, and more on user features.

The current layout should be changed into something more user friendly. This would require some effort as the page is mostly generated automatically at the moment.

The content on the page should be broken into multiple categories and links/cards

Proposed categories:
User features:

  • Content Creation & Editing
    • Page Editing
    • Templates & Forms
    • Real Time Collaboration (Guide doesn’t exist yet)
    • History
    • Copy/Move/Rename Pages (Guide doesn’t exist yet)
    • Comments & Annotations (Guide doesn’t exist yet)
    • Attachments (Current guide needs some updates. Should mention embedding images/videos/PDFs/other)
  • Navigation & Content Organization
    • Navigation Menu (Current “Page Navigation” guide)
    • Advanced Search / Full Text Search (Guide doesn’t exist yet)
    • Content Organization (Current guide needs some updates)
    • Mobile Responsiveness (Guide doesn’t exist yet)
    • Tags (Guide doesn’t exist yet)
    • Keyboard Shortcuts
  • Sharing & Collaboration
    • Mentions (Guide doesn’t exist yet)
    • Likes (Guide doesn’t exist yet)
    • Notifications (Current “Getting notified” guide)
    • Tasks (Guide doesn’t exist yet)

Icons should also be updated to something more modern, if possible.

Admin Features:

  • Skins (Current guide needs some updates)
  • Accessibility
  • Internationalization
  • Applications, Extensions & Flavors
  • Rights Management (Current guide needs some updates)
  • Users and Groups Management
  • Imports
  • Exports
  • Logs (Guide doesn’t exist yet)
  • Data Migration (Guide doesn’t exist yet)
  • Page Lifecycle

Developer Features:

  • RESTful remote API (Current guide needs some updates. Hard to follow.)
  • Scalability & Performance
  • Database Support
  • Authentication (Current guide needs some updates. More mentions and resources for LDAP/AD/SSO)
  • Programming
  • Installation Methods (Guide needs to be updated – page should primarily point to internal resources, not external ones and links to installation instructions should be more visible)

“Other Features” section should be renamed to something more descriptive.
If possible, the mention of using extensions should be presented in a more appealing way.

That’s about it regarding my opinions. Now I’m interested in what you think!

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Hi Gabriel, I think we need to talk about this together first, and I can explain to you how it’s coded currently (this is an automated page), and what is the current strategy and direction to improve this page (in short we’re moving the features to extensions with user/admin/devs sections, and we need to move the doc accordingly + discuss where to put cross-extension tutorials).

I’ve discussed this a few time in the past (like 10 years ago :)) on the mailing list + forum (would need to find again what we said or redo it), especially as I’m the main one who worked on the xwiki.org doc structure with Caty (old committer). I propose that we do a brainstorming together and then we send some proposal here, WDYT?

Thanks a lot.

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Hi Vincent! Thanks for the feedback.
I totally agree. I’ll follow up privately so we can set up a meeting.