Upgraded XWiki from 13.x to 17.x and I expected a more modern UI out of the box: better typography, cleaner navigation, improved overall visual design, and a more polished user experience.
However, after the upgrade, the interface still feels very similar to the old version and looks quite dated. Functionally it works, but visually it still has a very “2000s” appearance.
Is there any recommended way to modernize the look of XWiki on 17.x?
For example:
better built-in themes
improved fonts/typography
more modern icon packs
cleaner navigation/sidebar styling
UI extensions or best practices for refreshing the overall appearance
I’d appreciate any recommendations from others who have improved the default XWiki look without heavily customizing the whole frontend.
Hello. It’s easy to use words like: “better”, “more modern”, “improved”, “more polished”, “2000 appearance” but it doesn’t mean much and everyone will imagine something different, and have different tastes.
If you really want to help XWiki to get better on these aspects, it would help if you could be very precise and explain exactly what you mean for each item, with suggestions to what it should be in your opinion.
Note that there have been hundreds of UI changes from version 13.x to 17.x.
Now if you just want to customize your own XWiki instance, please check the XWiki doc and you’ll find guide and doc for:
Hello @vmassol,
I’ve already read lots of documentations but themes and skins didn’t help to improve UI. I’ve made two screenshots of how looks xwiki and forum. Can I get something like forum?
Anything is possible with a skin. It’s a lot of work (depending on whether or not you want to surface all XWiki features in the skin), but it’s relatively easy to get a skin for the view mode for ex, and keep the default skin for the admin UI for ex.
You need to read more about skins because you can change 100% of the UI with skins. See for ex 