Proposal to better differentiate deleted and non-existing pages

https://jira.xwiki.org/browse/XWIKI-22361


Hey everyone,

Here’s a quick proposal to better differentiate between deleted and non-existing pages. This comes as a result of XWIKI-19068 and my own observations.

Currently, these two types of pages are different but quite similar, as shown below. The main difference between them is the table with past revisions at the bottom of the deleted page.

Current - Page Not Found

Current - Deleted Page

To make these two types of pages more distinct, I propose making some typographic adjustments.

New - Page Not Found

New - Deleted Page

These are primarily adjustments to existing typographic styles already present in XWiki.

Main Points of This Proposal:

  • The text is aligned to the left to improve readability and maintain consistency with standard document formatting.
  • The text content has been broken down into smaller parts and summarized. For example, “The requested page could not be found” is shortened to “Page Not Found.” Ancillary text is kept to reinforce the main title, along with the “edit this page” action.
  • A new subtitle has been added to provide context for related pages.
  • The outer box (using the box style from CKEditor) is applied to make it more obvious that this content is not part of the document itself.

I would like to know from you. What are your takes on this? Are there more types of pages that resemble the current ones for deleted and not found?

I am specially interested in @oanat 's opinion, since the original Jira is from her.

Thanks for reading!

Edit: Changed the deleted page proposal after @mflorea suggestion
Edit 2: Changed images because of inconsistencies on page title

How would this look for users who don’t have access to the recycle bin? Only the user who has deleted the page and admins have access to the recycle bin.

1 Like

It shouldn’t be too different from what it is today, apart from the proposed typography and text content changes.

This is the page currently, I took the screenshot in a deleted page with a guest user. Note that we have a mention of the recycle bin so I think is ok to keep that reference.

This is it with the proposed changes:

Edit: Changes deleted page proposal after @mflorea suggestion
Edit 2: Changed images because of inconsistencies on page title

There’s an inconsistency in tone between “Page not found” and “This page is on the recycle bin”. WDYT of:

  • Page not found
  • Page moved to recycle bin

Thanks,
Marius

Make sense, I’ve updated the images in the proposal. Thanks!

Thanks for working on this. I’m a bit confused in your screenshot where the title “Test Page” comes from since the breadcrumb says “Page Name”, I guess it’s just a mistake?
That being said I’m wondering if it wouldn’t be more clear to not display a page title at all but to display directly “Page not found” or “Page moved to recycle bin” as title, instead of putting the reference. wdyt?

It was a mistake, thank you! I corrected it in the images above.

Without the page title, the only reference to this element would be in the breadcrumb, and I think it can be easily missed by the user (small size). With the page title, we provide a reassurance to the user about what the message is referring to.

I agree that displaying the title looks a bit weird as it seems to indicate indirectly that the page exists (why would there be a title if the page doesn’t exist?). In addition, displaying the title makes the message below feel that it’s part of the page content and not a generic message. Maybe there’s some L&F tweak to make it clear that this a generic error/warning message?

Also, while you’re working on that UI, do you think it’s clear to users if they should click the “edit” or the “create” button if the page doesn’t exist?

Thanks

This is something that felt weird, for sure, but I didn’t want to change the doc header as I thought that there was a good reason for it to exist here. The create button makes sense for a resource that do not exist, but not the edit one.

A good compromise would be to bring elements from the doc header to the message. In that case, we could completely hide the header (this would also take @surli feedback into consideration) and still show context to the user, something like below:

Case A: Page Not found


Page not found
The page you are looking for does not exist, but you can create it.
[ + Create ]

Related pages
Home / Page 1
Home / Page 2


Case B: Page Previously deleted (user with recycle bin rights)


Page moved to recycle bin
The page “Page Name” was previously moved to the recycle bin. You can check each version below, or you can edit it to create a new version.
[ Edit ]

(version table)

Related pages
Home / Page 1
Home / Page 2


I will work to get these proposals more refined like the other mockups, but I wanted to get something out quickly.