Last month we ran a survey to find out more about how satisfied (or not!) the members of the XWiki community are with the XWiki product.
We were looking forward to learning more about:
- what users like / dislike about the product
- the features and improvements XWiki users would like to see in the product in the future and especially for XWiki 8.x.
Thanks a lot to the 21 people who filled it in! In this post you can find a summary of the results, with some interesting ideas on things to implement in the future.
Would you please take a few minutes to describe why you are satisfied / dissatisfied with XWiki?
Things users mentioned they're satisfied with (in random order)
- Flexibility
- Stability
- Scalability
- Openness
- Rights management
- Search engine
- Great UI/UX; UX has been greatly improved in recent releases
- Easy to customize even if you're not a programmer
- Active development & developer friendly
- Lots of plug-ins; the platform is enterprise ready with just a few extensions enabled, it is really easy to add new functionality with the plugin model
- Powerful REST API
- LDAP integration
- The support for multiple wiki inputs, the support for multiple different templating languages
- Virtual wikis support
- Better object system, APIs and community than Drupal
- Better look and better programmability compared to MediaWiki
- Exhaustive documentation with examples
- Good support; a reactive and nice community
Things XWiki users are not satisfied with (in random order)
- Sometimes the UI is confusing for end-users, especially not-so-technical users; the interface is a bit old school and hard to decipher
- Lack of integration (hard to build into the project development ecosystem)
- More relevant search (harder and harder to find a given document as the size of the wiki grows)
- Search button regularly fails when upgrading
- Dissatisfied with content navigation
- Recover deleted Attachments when using Filesystem store
- Main WebHome page is hard to customize
- Editor not competitive and buggy
- Still too hard to administer
- The upgrade process to new versions is very difficult; a few bugs and macros errors with every update
- Too many plugins / extensions are just basic, not finished and often not maintained or compatible with current version
- Keyboard bindings which conflict with those of MacOSX, especially the accents input
- Missing an XWiki sandbox with the latest version
- No support forum
- Documentation needs to be updated and improved; old documentation could be moved to an archive space
- Some JIRA bugs don't have answers, but most (99%) are answered/fixed anyway. Idea to close very old versions issues
- Difficulty to demonstrate, explain to end users, admins, developers all of XWiki's capabilities
Can you please indicate what new features and improvements you would like to see in the product in the future?
Again, in no particular order
- Simpler structure and interface to see right away what I'm going to find in each page/section/tool
- Better separation of UI for consumers and contributors
- Better usability, especially for content navigation
- Fix WYSIWYG implementation or find a better default text editor, CKEditor suggested
- Google-like realtime concurrent document editing
- Fullscreen mode for the source tab
- Well prepared flavors (typical installations) for wiki, public websites, project development compatible with the current version.
- Integration with open-source issue tracker (project development)
- Requirements management plug-in (integrated with issue tracker too) (project development)
- Integration with open-source source-control system (project development)
- Integration with chat systems like Gitter or Mattermost (project development)
- Integration with diagramming tool available from the WYSIWYG editor (project development)
- Document approving process
- Do less extensions, better
- Provide a way to convert pages to spaces
- Easily hide / show spaces (and help unclutter navigation)
- Drag and drop functionality for upload
- Bulk download
- Stronger and highly configurable user profile/user list feature-set that can be configured by a user/admin, not a developer; add a content bloc in user profile to allow the user to write his own doc (web link or whatever she wants)
- Make the blog application multilingual
- Better PDF export
- Quality of office import/export could be improved
- Wiki farm login
- OAuth login/Social login working and built in
- Better analytics
- Improved updates: content of release, update process, no risk update
- Improved performance
- The Spaces widget is suboptimal for large wikis
- Semantic capabilities, particularly the ability to import an ontology
- Capability to apply StyleSheet to an entire wiki without Programming Rights
- A professional, good forum for the community support (based on XWiki?)
- Tutorials, wizards, video demos for new features.
- Improved documentation
- A documented application example with groovy code
- Polishing and bugfixes.
Thanks for all the interesting feedback and for helping improve XWiki. Now all XWiki developers should look at this list when deciding/discussing what features/items to implement in 8.x and beyond. In a year or so we could do a postmortem to see what has been implemented.
