I’m fine with that. Anyone against it?
Fine with me too.
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Our main goal is to reduce the size of XS to the minimum and have users be able to install extensions for extra stuff they need. So, I was wondering if there was another way instead of moving the demo templates to platform. The challenge IMO is to keep it simple and discoverable for XWiki admins.
We introduced the ability to discover macros a while ago (you can see all existing macros in the wysiwyg macro wizard and if you use a macro that exists and is not installed you’re proposed to install it).
Would it be possible to do something similar and have extensions that contribute page templates also expose that as extension metadata and then inside the Create Page dialog, if you’re an Admin and there’s no template (for example, I don’t know if that’s the best criteria), then have a list of extensions bringing templates listed so that an admin can install one or several with one click.
WDYT? Too complex?
Platform and XS are not the same thing. The first question is: who’s maintaining these demo templates? If the answer is XWiki Development team then it means these demo templates should be under the xwiki GitHub organization, where xwiki-platform makes the most sense. Then the question you seem to raise is: should these demo templates be bundled in XS by default or not? I’m not against excluding them from XS, but this is a separate discussion IMO. I mean, we still need to decide where to keep these demo templates, whether we bundle them in XS by default or not. Are you suggesting that we should keep them in xwiki-contrib if not bundled in XS? The problem is maintaining them and keeping them up to date with XS. It’s not always easy to have a template that works well with multiple versions of XWiki. This is actually the root “problem” that started this thread: I improved the templates, but in order to do, so I had to use some styles / CSS classes that are available in the latest XWiki version. So I had two options:
- duplicate those styles in the contrib application, to work with older versions of XWiki
- or move the templates to XS and thus use the latest styles from XWiki
Thanks,
Marius
Disclaimer: I’m just exploring some ideas here, I’m not convinced myself yet about what is the best option but I’d prefer that we don’t bring the extension in platform and then remove it again in a few months/year. So it’s probably good to list all options on the table before deciding.
Yes, that’s the good question. Until now it was officially Caty who was marked as the project lead on contrib. The last real change. In practice, the fact that these templates are bundled by default in XS forces the XWiki core dev team to maintain them (we didn’t improve them for a very long time and only fixed bugs).
By using a discovery mechanism we’d be removing the maintenance duty from the XWiki core dev team.
In short we need to decide if having some default page templates for some domains is a core feature or not. I have the feeling that ideally we should have a lot of templates for all types of domains (see Notion) and there’s be no reason to have them all bundled in a single extension since no XWiki instance will need them all. Thus, I think it’s the admin of a wiki who should ultimately choose what template or template set he/she needs for the wiki. WDYT?
Forcing the admin to decide if he/she wants to have these templates could help with ^^^ too.
I guess the same question could be asked for the Sandbox “feature” too. It’s not core and serves as an example. I’d be curious to know if the sandbox feature is used often or not.
Yet another way of making these templates installed would be to have a step in the DW, to propose some specific extensions upon the first start of XWiki: Sandbox, Basic Templates, etc. Not sure what criteria we would use to propose extensions though…