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Summary of the XWiki 8.x Cycle

Version 3.93 by Ecaterina Moraru (Valica) on 2017/07/18
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This is a summary of the release notes for XWiki Commons, XWiki Rendering, XWiki Platform and XWiki Enterprise, for the whole 8.x cycle (i.e. the whole year 2016). They share the same release notes as they are released together and have the same version.

The 8.x cycle focused a lot on usability and consistency, starting with a new homepage that is more easy to edit, and continuing with tours and more help information in form of tips. 

We replaced the old GWT WYSIWYG editor with the CKEditor, making sure you don't miss previous configuration.

We started providing more default page templates and made the Application Within Minutes to create automatically the template for your new application. You can define creation and the visibility restrictions for the page template, choose an icon and description, for an optimal display in the creation step.

We also added recommendations for extensions in Extension Manager.

We continued the Nested Pages polishing, while we deprecated and retired multiple projects like Colibri Skin, Color Themes, old XWiki 1.0 syntax.

Work Done

The work is organised using JIRA and here are some JIRA stats of what happened during the 8.x cycle:

  • 1461 issues were closed (See the full JIRA issue list)
  • 745 bugs closed, 423 improvements, 66 new features and more:

    jira-issue-types-8x.png

  • And the top JIRA participants (those contributing to more than 1% of the total jira issue number):

    jira-assignees-8x.png

Congrats to all who participated!

Top 10 Features

Here are some top 10 features that we wish to highlight (arbitrarily hand-picked; it's hard to pick 10 out of 489 improvements and new features):

homepage.png

New Homepage

We replaced the Dashboard application from the main Homepage and added introductory steps as wiki syntax. This change will make it simpler for new users to edit the Homepage content, while also benefiting from some basic help concepts. The left panels area also showcases now the 'Navigation' panel, while the right panels area contain a 'Need Help?' panel.

ckeditor.png
defaultWysiwygEditorConfig.png
wysiwyg-config.png
link-dialog.png

CKEditor by default

  • We have a new default WYSIWYG editor: the CKEditor. The integration with CKEditor was already available as an extension and now this extension is bundled with the standard XWiki distribution.
  • The old WYSIWYG editor is still available and if you want to switch back to it you can do it from the "Edit Mode Settings" section in the Wiki Administration.
  • The "WYSIWYG Editor" section from the Wiki Administration has been extended to support CKEditor configuration.
  • The XWiki integration has been improved to support automatic link creation when dropping a non-image file over the editing area. 
  • Creating a link to a non-existing wiki page has been simplified.
  • CKEditor has been upgraded to version 4.6.0 which brings a new flat skin and a lot of improvements and bug fixes. 

step4.png

Tour for Homepage

  • A tour has been created to present the existing UI elements from the home page. Every user will be guided through this tour in order to become familiar with XWiki.

homepage.png

New Homepage

We replaced the Dashboard application from the main Homepage and added introductory steps as wiki syntax. This change will make it simpler for new users to edit the Homepage content, while also benefiting from some basic help concepts. The left panels area also showcases now the 'Navigation' panel, while the right panels area contain a 'Need Help?' panel.

Top User Features

For our users, here are the top features that we wish to highlight:

Drawer.png

Drawer menu has changed

The drawer menu has changed to display the "scope" of the displayed items. Items are ordered regarding if their scope is "local" (i.e. it affects only the current wiki) and "global" (i.e. it affects the whole farm).

The change have been made after users complaining the old menu was not very clear, and after a poll sent on the mailing list.

Some items like "Home", "Create Wiki" and "Delete Wiki" has been removed from that menu, in order to focus on frequent operations that really deserve a place in this important menu. We offer other means in the UI to achieve these operations.

appIndex.png

Application Index

We removed some applications from the AppBar (like Scheduler, Invitation, Panels, etc.) with the intention to simplify the interface and promote a smaller number of applications inside the AppBar panel. In order for the applications to still be discoverable, we added in the Drawer an Application Index.

homepage.png

New Homepage

We replaced the Dashboard application from the main Homepage and added introductory steps as wiki syntax. This change will make it simpler for new users to edit the Homepage content, while also benefiting from some basic help concepts. The left panels area also showcases now the 'Navigation' panel, while the right panels area contain a 'Need Help?' panel.

export.png

XAR Children Export

It's now possible, for HTML and XAR formats, to export selected children along with the current page.

childrenmacro.png

Children Macro

A new {{children/}} macro has been added to display a tree view of all children of the current page.

AppWithinMinutes-Step3.png
AppWithinMinutes-CreatePage.png

App Within Minutes integration with Create Page dialog

We added a new step to the App Within Minutes wizard to configure the location where the application entries are created. This step generates a template provider for the application and thus exposes the application in the Create Page dialog. This means that now you can create application entries not only from the application home page (using "Add new entry") but also from other pages using the Create Page dialog.

New applications created with the new version of the App Within Minutes wizard will not use the Data page any more. The application entries will be created directly under the application home page by default. Of course, you can configure the location with the new wizard step.

ckeditor-fullscreen.png
wysiwyg-config.png
link-dialog.png

CKEditor Integration Improvements

The CKEditor Integration extension has been upgraded to version 1.9 which brings a couple of improvements and bug fixes:

  • The "WYSIWYG Editor" section from the Wiki Administration has been extended to support CKEditor configuration
  • The link dialog has a new text input to specify the link label
  • The form action buttons are now available in full-screen mode
  • CKEditor has been upgraded to the latest stable version 4.5.11

ckeditor.png

CKEditor Integration Improvements

CKEditor has been upgraded to version 4.6.0 which brings a new flat skin and a lot of improvements and bug fixes. The XWiki integration has been improved to support automatic link creation when dropping a non-image file over the editing area. Creating a link to a non-existing wiki page has been simplified. Check the CKEditor Integration documentation for more information.

TemplateProvider-Edit.png

Template Provider Improvements

We have improved the template provider edit form:

  • Both the creation and the visibility restrictions are now using a location picker. When you click on the "+" icon a popup appears with the page tree from where you can select one or multiple locations.
  • The icon field is now using an icon picker.
  • We rearranged the fields in order to better fill the available space. The left column contains visibility / display options, while the right column contains creation options.
  • We added more hints and improved some of the field labels.

See the Template Provider documentation for more information.

activityStream.png
comments.png
userIndex.png
userPicker.png

Improved avatar image quality

XWiki supports server-side image resizing since version 2.5 but the quality of the scaled images was poor up until now. Starting with this version we're using the Thumbnailator library which leads to better image quality. This is most noticeable in the case of the user avatars.

blogPostTemplateProvider.png

Blog Post Template

You now have the option to create a blog post from anywhere inside the Blog page (or one of its children) by simply using the + (create page) button and selecting Blog Post as your new page's type

exo4.png

Active Installs for Extensions

The number of active installs is displayed for each extension in the Repository App's home page livetable and in the extension page.

rating_home.png

Ratings on Extensions Repository home page

Rating is now displayed in the Repository App's home page livetable.

docnotfound-suggestsions-mixed.png
attachmentnotfound-suggestsions-mixed.png

Not Found Suggestions

We have added suggestions for the "document not found" and "attachment not found" error screens. The suggestions address minor typos and misspelling (including lower case vs upper case), but also bad location requests.

documentTree.png

Document Tree Improvements

The tree now displays the rendered translated page title when the showDocumentTitle parameter is set to true, which is the default value. So the document tree is now taking into account the current locale when displaying the page titles. Moreover, the child pages are now sorted by their raw translated title, with a fall-back on the raw default title and then on the page name (if the raw titles are empty). Note that the rendered title may be different than the raw title if the title is dynamic (i.e. has Velocity code) so the child pages may not be sorted correctly if some have dynamic titles. The child pages are sorted by their name when the showDocumentTitle parameter is set to false.

The support for relative references in the root and openTo parameters has been improved. You still need to prefix the entity reference with its entity type though.

{{documentTree root="document:Alice" openTo="document:Bob" /}}

The behavior of the limit parameter has changed a bit: if there is only one child node remaining the "more ..." link is replaced by that child node, instead of displaying "one more".

The child nodes should be loaded much faster now as we refactored and improved the database queries used under the hood.

home-with-recommendations.png
extension.png

Extension Repository adds recommendations

The Extension Repository Application now supports the optional feature of being able to mark some Extensions as Recommended. This provides some form of curation and separate "good" Extensions from others. The need arises when there are lots of Extensions. 

The screenshots show:

  • The view when the Recommendation feature is turned on
  • How a Recommended Extension is displayed with a badge showing it's Recommended

UserPreferencesView.png
UserPreferencesEdit.png

Default values in User Preferences

When you go to your user profile in order to changes your preferences, you now see better what are the default values (both in view and edit modes).

create-page.gif

Ability to filter the page types

When you create a new page, you have to chose the type in a lot of them. To help you to pick the one you want, you can now filter them thanks to a text input.

create-form.png

The "page type" picker is bigger

In order to better see the available page types (like Encyclopedia, Article, etc...), the "page type" selector has been enlarged.

CreateWiki.png

Create Wiki button in the Wiki Index

A button "Create Wiki" has been added on the top of the Wiki Index, so you can decide to create a wiki after browsing the existing ones. 

This behavior is more consistent with the Blog Application, where you can create a new post in the same page that you could read existing ones. In the future, we will make this behavior generic in XWiki.

Top Admin Features

For our admins, here are the top features that we wish to highlight:

EM-searchResults.png
EM-searchnorecommended.png

Display recommended extensions in the Extension Manager

Extension Manager is now displaying only recommended extension by default.

You can still switch to All Remote Extensions. If no recommended extension is can be found for the provided search, the result for All Remote Extensions is displayed.

admin-rendering.png
edit-more-syntaxes.png

Configure Syntaxes

It's now possible to easily configure the markup syntaxes that you wish to be made available to your users when writing pages, directly from the Admin UI.
More details

FlamingoThemePicker.png
FlamingoThemesHome.png

Global Color Themes

It's now possible, on a subwiki, to use a color theme coming from the main wiki (global themes).

TemplateProvider-Edit-creationRestrictions.png

Template Restrictions

It's now possible to specify visibility restrictions separate from creation restrictions on a template provider and to set default values. See the documentation for more details.

languages.png

Language Picker

It's now easier to select a language in the administration for your wiki.

subwikiinit.png

Wiki initialization

Like the main wiki, sub wikis now have asynchronous initialization. This reduce a lot the chance that one or several initializing wikis end up eating all the farm input threads.

appbar-reorder.gif

Ability to re-order items in the Applications Panel

It's now possible to re-order the items displayed in the Application Panel, in the administration.

filtering.gif

Localization Section

It's now easier to pick a time zone or a language in the "Localization" section of the Administration, thanks to a filter box.

Top Developer Features

For our developers, here are the top features that we wish to highlight:

xwiki-select-filter.png

XWiki Select Widget can be filtered

When you use an XWiki Select Widget, you can now let the user filter the proposed options dynamically.

contexttoc

Execute Macros in context of another page

The Context Macro now supports executing macros in the context of the referenced document by using the new transformationContext parameter.

For example the following content generates the screenshot:

{{context document="Sandbox.WebHome" transformationContext="document"}}
{{toc/}}
{{/context}}

Detailed Release Notes

If you wish to see the full details of all features and improvements you can check each release note.

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