• User Interface Improvements
  • Colibri skin
  • Color Theme Editor
  • Improvements to Action Menus
  • New Profile UI
  • Visible content menu when scrolling down
  • New Search Interface
  • Preliminary optional accessibility stylesheet
  • More consistent use of user avatars
  • Further improvements to the edit UI
• Annotations
• Activity Stream
• Invitation Manager Application
• Anonymous commenting with Captcha
• Deleted documents and attachments
• New Template-based page creation
• Clustering
• Easier development of configurable applications using XWiki.ConfigurableClass
• Office Preview (support for viewing attached office documents in the wiki)

User Interface Improvements

Colibri skin

XWiki 2.0 introduces a new, lightweight, easily customizable skin. The main goal of the Colibri skin is to provide the proper support for fast and easy modifications of the look and feel of the wiki.

See Colibri skin documentation for more details.

Color Theme Editor

The new editor allows fast and easy modifications for the look and feel of the wiki. You'll find in this editor 

• A new way of displaying themes on the "Color Themes" space home

  

• The ability to create a new theme from the "Color Theme" space home
• A palette for each area you are editing with a popup listing everything you can customize at this level
• A dialog where you can make the desired changes
• The possibility to undo the latest modifications or reset all changes

Read more about Color Themes on the dedicated application page.

Improvements to Action Menus

• New Add menu: Use the "Add" menu to create new spaces, pages, add attachments and comments.

  

• Improved Wiki and Space menus: You may now access the document index straight from the wiki & space menus.
• New Page menu: Integrates the Watch, Copy, Rename and Delete actions.
• The Edit, Export, More actions and Profile menus also benefited from a refresh.

New Profile UI

• Complete overhaul of the Profile UI: better display of the user information, recent changes by the user are shown, different tabs for user details, user settings, and watchlist information:
  
• Improved inline-based editing for modifying profile details
• Inclusion of the WatchList manager page into the Profile as a tab
• Added a tab in the Profile for managing user preferences, which is currently rather small, but will be improved later to include more settings
• User profiles have been converted to XWiki Syntax 2.0

Visible content menu when scrolling down

• When scrolling down on a document, the content menu will follow, so the user will not have to scroll up on top of the page in order to access it.
  

New Search Interface

• The default search page UI has been improved to be easier to understand and use.
  

Preliminary optional accessibility stylesheet

Moving further on the quest for better accessibility in the XWiki platform, we introduced a preliminary stylesheet which makes the skin slightly more accessible to people with visual disabilities: bigger fonts by default, and underlined links to make them more easily distinguished by colorblind people. This stylesheet can either be activated globally in a wiki, or individually from each user's preferences.

More consistent use of user avatars

Avatars now come in three default sizes:

• small avatars, 30px wide, used in secondary actions and where there's very little space available
• medium avatars, 50px wide, the preferred and most frequent display option for avatars
• large avatars,120px wide, to be used where a large version of the avatar must be displayed (for example in the user profile)

• Accordingly, the wiki dashboard has been changed to use the medium avatars, and as a new feature user avatars are displayed in the comments area.
  
• Four new velocity macros have been added for making it easier to display avatars:
• User avatars are also displayed in annotations.

Further improvements to the edit UI

After the improvements to the object and class editors introduced in 1.8 and 2.4, the wiki and WYSIWYG editors also see some enhancements in this release, bringing in some of the proposed changes from an older proposal, with some additional improvements. Specifically:

• A new label for the content area in the wiki editor:
• A more descriptive label for the version summary field
• Better positioning of the "minor edit" option
• Better positioning and display of the "autosave" option
  

Annotations

The scope of this feature is to allow users to annotate text in a XWiki document. With the new feature you can:

• Make annotations by selecting the text and pressing

  Ctrl + M (Meta + M)
  

• Show annotations on your page
• See an annotation for a text item by hovering over the yellow icon next to it
• Edit and delete annotations straight from the page
• Manage annotations from the "Annotations" tab

You can find a more detailed description of the annotations feature on the documentation page.

Activity Stream

• Overhaul of the Recent Changes section of the Dashboard:
  • New UI
  • Support for more events compared to the previous Recent Changes: annotations, comments, document deletion
  • It's now called Recent Activity (was called Recent Changes)
    

Invitation Manager Application

• The Invitation Manager application allows users to send emails, inviting friends and colleagues to join a wiki. You will be able to configure your wiki to send emails through an open mail relay on the server or through an email account of your choosing.
  

Read more about this application and learn how to configure it by visiting the application page.

Anonymous commenting with Captcha

Now thanks to the captcha module you can require unregistered users to solve a captcha in order to post comments. To require guests to solve a captcha simply go to the "Rights" section of the Administration Application for the wiki or just the space, and check the box saying "Require unregistered users to solve a captcha when posting a comment on a page". Note This box does not give guests permission to comment, it only adds a requirement for commenting if they already have permission.
This feature is documented here.

• Sample:
  

Deleted documents and attachments

While deleted documents and attachments have been stored in a trash instead of being completely deleted since XWiki 1.2, there was no general interface for viewing the contents of the trash. This has been remedied by the introduction of two new tabs in the wiki's Document Index, Deleted Documents and Deleted Attachments.

• Sample:
  
• Both use the livetable, thus allowing filtering and ordering for easier browsing. A document from the trash can be viewed, permanently deleted, or restored if the location is still available.
• The attachment trash contains only attachments deleted from a document, and not attachments that were deleted together with their owner document; in the latter case, the attachments are kept together with the document in the document trash. For attachments, there is no restore option yet, it will be implemented in a future release.

New Template-based page creation

Starting with XWiki Enterprise 2.4 users and applications can provide documents that can be used as template when creating new pages. The new document content (content, objects and other metadata) will be replicated from the template.

• After you have created the template and the template provider you can then  start creating pages from this template:
  

• "Wanted Links" also offers the choice to create the new document from the available templates ( "My Template" template in the image below):

Find more details about the template creation and administration on the documentation page.

Clustering

XWiki provides an easy way to setup clustered instances of XWiki based on network events distribution.

• events synchronization between XWiki instances
• multiple clustering channels
• possibility to start stop clustering channel at runtime

Follow the Clustering Admin Guide  and Clustering Tutorial  for a complete tutorial on how to setup a simple cluster between two instances of XWiki on the same server.

Easier development of configurable applications using XWiki.ConfigurableClass

If you are developing an application and you need to provide your users with a way to configure it from the Administration Application you are in luck. All you need to do is create a custom class holding all of the configuration for your application, then add an object of your custom configuration class and an object of XWiki.Configurable class. You will be able to configure your application from the administration interface.
The following is an image of the administration interface with additional applications to be configured (you can customize the icon used).

• Sample:
  

Note the current user does not have permission to edit one of the configurable applications.

Office Preview (support for viewing attached office documents in the wiki)

• XWiki now supports viewing attached office documents without saving them on the client side. Click on the eye icon near the edit and delete buttons corresponding to the attachment you want to preview.
  
• We also included a new Macro for the WYSIWYG Editor. It allows to embed a office file into a page.