Implement collapsing panels

Development
1

Good morning!
I found out recently about the issue XWIKI-10498: Implement collapsing & expanding panels on Flamingo. I decided to make a quick prototype to see if that’s really something we want in XWiki.

The idea of this PR is to add a collapsing behaviour to navigation panels.
<1> In my opinion, if we add it to navigation panels, we should add it to any panel. The navigation category is pretty loosely defined in my opinion and this might be difficult for users to understand why some panels can be collapsed and not others.
<2> In order to have clear controls, and consistency with other places where we have dropdowns, in my implementation I decided to add collapse buttons. From what I could see, it used to just be toggled from a click on the header a long time ago.

This gives the following prototype:

10498-proposal
10498-proposal2538×707 149 KB

(Implementation so far is here)
The idea is that a click on the caret buttons would:
A. Rotate the caret so that it faces the left
B. Collapse the content of the panel
Another click afterwards would toggle OFF those changes.

In my opinion this clutters the UI for minimal user improvements and this shouldn’t be something we implement in a standard XWiki flavor.
Moreover there’s other solutions to fix the issue the reporter indicated:

  • move the very long Navigation panel to the end of the panel list, so that there’s no need to scroll.
  • custom panel augmentation for the users who’d still need it.

Do you think it would be alright to close XWIKI-10498: Implement collapsing & expanding panels on Flamingo as a Won't fix?

Thank you,
Lucas C.

2

To add a little bit of history: XWiki panels used to be collapsible in very old versions of XWiki which were based on the skin before the current Flamingo.

I’m fine with both, not strong opinion on this. Just mentioning that we definitely did not get many complaints regarding this “regression” all these years.

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3

I agree with this. Note that in order for this feature to be useful the collapsed / expanded state needs to be persisted acros page reloads (e.g. local storage). XWiki doesn’t follow the single-page application pattern so the panels are re-rendered each time you navigate to a diffrent wiki page. Moreover, I think the ability to collapse the entire panel column (to the right / left) is far more useful.

Thanks,
Marius

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4

Agreed. It could be an option for the panel for easy customization by the admin, so a very particular panel could be collapsible, but I think it’s a very specific use case.

5

+1 for the won’t fix option

6

Thanks for your feedback!

Closing as Won't fix :slight_smile:

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