How to increase active installs of XWiki?

[vmassol]

@rbr

Documentation I: There is a lot of documentation, which is good, yet it “feels” scattered. There are only few walkthroughs. To install xwiki with tomcat and mysql you need to read at least two or three documents just to get started. While I know this is considered the hardest way, it is currently the only way that I see to run xwiki in the companies I know.

Altough I really wanted to try out xwiki I did not feel really encouraged, because the installation documentation looked like a real hard piece of work. I guess if I had to evaluate xwiki it may have been out of the game at this point. This may be only me, but I became extremely maintenance and operations focused, so I try to avoid everything that “smells” like trouble and hard to read installation documents are the first sign of trouble for me.

Also the documentation is often sprinkled with hints for or references to old or “obsolete” versions. While they may serve a purpose for some, I found them distracting.

There are several topics here:

• General documentation
• Guides/Tutorials
• Obsolete parts
• Installation guides
• Supported versions

Let me try to reply with the thoughts it evokes in me so that we can try to find what we can do about it.

@rbr

To install xwiki with tomcat and mysql you need to read at least two or three documents just to get started.

Actually that’s not fully correct. There’s only a single document listing all steps you have to perform for the WAR install (I assume this is the one you’re referring to): http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Documentation/AdminGuide/Installation/InstallationWAR/

Ofc we can’t guess what servlet container or what DB the user wants to use so the user has to click on the right link but they’re all listed.

7 servlet containers on 8 databases that’s 56 combinations

Now the reality is that the majority of users will want Tomcat and MySQL (see http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/ActiveInstalls/).

Do you really believe that the issue is that you need to click on links in the current documentation?

What we could do but I’m really not sure it’s worth the cost would be to develop a small app for this. Looks overkill to me. WDYT?

Regarding installation, I think that one potential issue is that users will jump to the manual WAR install (which is the most complex one) when sometimes they could use the DEB or Docker installs for example. Do you think that’s true? I’ve tried to reword a bit http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Documentation/AdminGuide/Installation/#HInstallationMethods to put the WAR install as the last one.

You said:

@rbr

it is currently the only way that I see to run xwiki in the companies I know.

So the apt-get way is not good in your cases?

@rbr

Altough I really wanted to try out xwiki I did not feel really encouraged, because the installation documentation looked like a real hard piece of work. I guess if I had to evaluate xwiki it may have been out of the game at this point. This may be only me, but I became extremely maintenance and operations focused, so I try to avoid everything that “smells” like trouble and hard to read installation documents are the first sign of trouble for me.

I’ve read again http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Documentation/AdminGuide/Installation/InstallationWAR/ and it didn’t look that bad. Do you have specific examples of things that we could improve? I just had one idea when reading it which is to move some stuff in a section at the bottom, for example for the Security Manager thing.

One thing that is apparently not working so well is that the documentation is a wiki and everyone is encouraged to help out and reword things, move things around, etc.

@rbr

Also the documentation is often sprinkled with hints for or references to old or “obsolete” versions. While they may serve a purpose for some, I found them distracting.

I agree with this one. Actually our rule is simple: we only support 3 branches in the documentation, see https://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/Support#HSupportedVersions So normally anything older than 9.11.x should get cleaned/removed.