I’m looking for a way to make the xwiki editing experience similar to the recent trends in content editing on the web: inline editing. Ckeditor has a balloon editor and inline editor.
The idea is to not have to click the ‘edit’ or ‘save’ button, thus open all pages in edit mode and auto-save edits immediately.
I’m curious about this part. When would you save? On leaving the page? If not, does it mean you would save every N seconds? If so, how do you handle the large amount of revisions so that they are meaningful? That’s important for a wiki since it’s important to be able to quickly see what a user has done. Of course you can select several revisions to compare but it’s harder as you need to know when the revs start and end for a given edit session. When I use google docs or spreadsheet, I find that the history is barely usable.
I’m asking because we have the same issue with realtime and so far we’ve chosen to save when the user hits the save button.
I see your point about the Wiki requirements of saving.
I think from a UX viewpoint, I thik the inline editing popularity emerged from the need to reduce clicks when editing.
For a wiki, I think its useful to allow users to choose between two options in the default page settings, and or individual page settings:
- Allow pages to be opened in edit mode by default, and still require hitting the save button, Version is saved only when they click save.
- Allow pages to be opened in edit mode by default and auto-save the content in the background immediately without asking for confirmation. Leaving the page has no impact because everything is saved anyway immediately (like google docs). Save button is still available to save a description of the changes when needed, e.g. a major change. The automatic saving of ‘changes’ can be done every x minutes or every x characters.
In general, the amount of clicks needed to create and edit pages is relatively high in Xwiki, although I understand that specific features require that. I think Xwiki can still maintain its current more click-intensive creating and editing of pages, while also allowing automating behaviors with presets and trigger buttons.
yes, and we’d like to reduce that. See for example https://design.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Proposal/SingleClickPageCreation
I remember that we discussed “edit mode by default” in the past (I also remember proposing inline editing on double click) but AFAIR most committers were against it (I don’t recall the reasons). I agree that it’s a topic that we should revisit, and you’re raising it by posting this thread so that’s good.
1 Like