Vaughan Schmidt 16 Years Ago Thanks for these improvements! I look forward to testing as soon as I get a chance. Please sign in to reply. Reply as... Cancel
Matte Black 16 Years Ago Jorge,Superb write up. For someone that claims to not be a UI expert, you sure play one well on Liferay. I can't find much in my notes on this that you haven't already covered. You have captured 95% of what makes any wiki work well, and made it nicely consistent with the Liferay GUI. Really well done. Having said that, I will toss in a few pennies:1) You make no mention of templating and CSS, and I think you may already be making a mistake that most wikis do, treating the presentation layer as an afterthought (but i could be wrong). Unless you're just speaking of the default look and feel, you seem to be assuming that one particular interface is always the right solution in a wiki, so you fuss over size and position of title, etc. Most wikis have a monolithic approach to the Wiki, and that ALWAYS limits how the wiki can be used. For example, in a wiki URL directory, or personal profile, or product record, you may want a somewhat different overall look. You should just build the core structure, and rely on templates/CSS, and let the portlet designer design on the final presentation. Properly rendered, even your tab controls could be made vertical side tabs via CSS. (You probably do intend this flexibility. You've thought of everything else 2) I would prefer that Liferay Wiki not reinvent wiki syntax, when both TextTile and Markdown are so widely used and have parsers out there as Open source. They have a lot of work in them, and as you later support footnotes, annotations, etc., those parsers become a lot of work you can avoid (but the existing parses can be customized.)http://swik.net/Textile(Mediawiki is a homegrown, and rather inferior, IMHO)3) Your help text sidebar is good, and ones like it have become common on many wikis, but it must hide, and that state persist, or it annoys the hell out of power users who don't need it. Any our users always complain about that plain dumb, scrolling sidebar, or worse, separate page. Consider an accordion bar (sliding vertical panes), with panels like " Text, Lists, Links, Tables,". This will instantly distinguish Liferay wiki from 99% of them out there, where help is an afterthought.4) Are you considering your wiki as the repository for localization texts? That was a great idea in Mediawiki, but not particularly well implemented (at least, 3 years ago when I used it most).I am going to get my partners to run this today, so I can actually use it. Kudos! Please sign in to reply. Reply as... Cancel
Rich Sezov 16 Years Ago Jorge, this is awesome! I've been meaning to grab the latest source for days now, and you just provided the motivation. :-) Please sign in to reply. Reply as... Cancel
Bryan Cheung 16 Years Ago Jorge, You totally rock. I will check it out and tell you what I think. Please sign in to reply. Reply as... Cancel
Jorge Ferrer 16 Years Ago - Edited Hey All,Thanks a lot for your encouragement, you made my day @Matte: You are right, I was careful enough to allow CSS styling. In fact saying that I made the title bigger was an over simplification. Here is an example HTML code that I'm pretty sure will keep you happy:<h2 class="wiki-page-title"><a href="...">FrontPage</a></h2>Regarding the wiki syntax, I've been taking a look at TextTile and I'm sold It's absolutely great. Ideally we should be able to support as many engines as we want if they have a Java engine. BTW, I've seen that there are several Java libraries for Textile, do you recommend any of them in particular?Regarding hiding the help, it's a good idea and simple to implement (added to my TODO list). Finally, regarding the repository for localization texts, could you elaborate on that? I would suggest doing it in a separate forum thread and linking it from a comment here. Please sign in to reply. Reply as... Cancel
David Truong 16 Years Ago hot i just dugg your article =) Please sign in to reply. Reply as... Cancel
Vaughan Schmidt 16 Years Ago (cross-posting this notice on related topics / blogs / forums)Per several comments (@Matte's on original Blog post and Jorge's in the Forums):I have started a Proposed Project page at Liferaypedia to try to capture key discussion points and bring together information in Blogs / comments / forums.See http://wiki.liferay.com/index.php/Wiki_OverhaulI am shamelessly refactoring some of this content, and hope this is not a problem with anyone - trying to give credit and make references as best I can given time available. Please sign in to reply. Reply as... Cancel
Suleyman Ayaz 16 Years Ago Jorge,Greate that you are improving the wiki portlet. I haven't used it before but now were are implementing it for a user and see the same things that you are talking about. The main issiu that we have is the creation of pages and the linking betwean the pages. In the classic view it's very easy en intuitive te make new pages with Camel Case notation. But having a webpage/wiki page without images and rich content is like prehistoric. So we want to use the html view but then we loos the cool Camel case page creation and linking. I see in your post that you made a way to create pages but the screenshot show that you create it outside the editor. How is it then possible to make links to these pages from other pages? I would like to try this but I don't have any knowledge how to do so. I think that it's not possible to just take the wiki portlet files. But greate initiative. It really needed/needs some changes. Please sign in to reply. Reply as... Cancel
Garey Smiley 16 Years Ago Whow! Great improvements. I was in the process of looking for an alternative to Liferay's wiki, but I don't think I'll need to now. Please sign in to reply. Reply as... Cancel