Top 10 Features introduced in XWiki Enterprise 3.x Cycle
The 3.x development cycle
- Quick and Easy application development with AppWithinMinutes
- Extend your wiki with the Extension Manager
- Better organization of your teams with Wiki Workspaces
- Getting social: Twitter-like messaging and networking inside the wiki
- Gallery Macro and Office Presentation Viewer
- Make your wiki documents accessible to desktop office suites through Office Document Export
- Let each user customize their environment for better productivity through User Dashboards
- Customizable PDF Export
- Find the right document faster thanks to the improved search results scoring
- User Interface Improvements for a better User Experience
- Bonus: Infrastructure changes
We've setup a Jira dashboard to present the work done during the previous cycle. In summary, 1444 issues have been closed by 19 committers (and other contributors providing patches), out of which 664 are fixed bugs.
Quick and Easy application development with AppWithinMinutes
After the introduction of the new class editor and the live table generator, this release brings the App Within Minutes wizard tying all the other aspects making up the App Within Minutes feature. The wizard helps you create collaborative web applications within minutes, based on XWiki's powerful structured data management system.
Start by going to the App Within Minutes home page. There you can see listed the existing applications. Click on the "Create Application" button to start the wizard.
In the first step you have to provide the application name, which will determine the application home page URL and the application space. Each application is mapped to an XWiki space.
In the second step you define the application structure, i.e. the type of data the application will handle. At the end of this step the wizard will create for you the template and the sheet that will be used to create new application entries.
In the last step you customize the way the home page of your application will look like. You can choose which columns to display in the entries live table.
At the end the wizard takes you to the home page of your application, which is the place from where you can manage the application data: edit the application structure, add new entries, edit or delete existing ones.
Extend your wiki with the Extension Manager
Although there's no back-end repository where to search for new extensions yet, the new UI for the Extension Manager is starting to shape up. The previous experimental UI has been replaced by a new category in the Administration dedicated to the extension manager, with three different sections.
Better organization of your teams with Wiki Workspaces
We have adopted the Workspace Application as an XWiki platform project. In a few words, the Workspace Application allows regular users to create workspaces where they can collaborate on a specific topic. Once the work is done, they can delete the workspace if they wish so. A workspaces is, in essence, a regular subwikis that is to be used only by global users. It allows global users to join or be invited and to easily navigate through the available workspaces and to the main wiki.
The Workspace Application suits best for intranets or any other usecase that involves having only global users and going back and forward through projects or departments that are separated in subwikis. On the other hand, the Workspace Application is not intended to be used in environments such as wiki farms, where each subwiki is a bubble, having it's own users and not knowing/caring about other subwikis or the main wiki. This later use case is better served by XWiki Enterprise Manager.
The Workspace Application is not bundled by default with any XWiki product, but it can be installed as an extension.
Getting social: Twitter-like messaging and networking inside the wiki
Users can now post status messages which will be visible on the main dashboard and on the user profile page.
Users can follow each other's activity streams.
In order to see the members of your network and the network activity you can use the Network menu:
which leads you to the Network tab from the user profile page:
Gallery Macro and Office Presentation Viewer
The Gallery Macro helps you create a simple image gallery where images are displayed using a slide-show view. You can use images from any source, both internal (attached to a wiki page) and external. The gallery macro collects all the images it finds in the macro content. The Office Macro has been improved to use the gallery macro when displaying office presentations:
Make your wiki documents accessible to desktop office suites through Office Document Export
If you configure your wiki to work with an office server (LibreOffice or OpenOffice) as described in the Office Importer Application you'll notice a new entry in the export menu (as long as you are connected to the office server). By default only the ODT (OpenDocument Text format) export is exposed but you can tweak the export URL to export to other office formats supported by your office server. For instance /xwiki/bin/export/Sandbox/WebHome?format=doc exports Sandbox.WebHome page to Microsoft Word's proprietary DOC format.
Let each user customize their environment for better productivity through User Dashboards
After wiki- and space-wide dashboards, this release brings support for personal dashboards. Each user can define their own dashboard in their profile document, and they can use it either in their profile document, or display it instead of the homepage default dashboard.
Customizable PDF Export
If you export a wiki page to PDF using the Export menu you'll get a panel where you can configure some PDF export options. These options are defined in the PDF velocity templates and were previously available only as query string parameters to the PDF export URL.
Find the right document faster thanks to the improved search results scoring
The search results retrieved by the Lucene plugin have been for a long time the target of many complaints, since documents that were actually relevant for a query usually appeared too low in the results list. This issue has now been improved, by scoring results differently depending on the field where the search query matches. A hit on the document title will ensure that the document will be among the first results, while a hit on the owner document's name of an attached image will place the image towards the end.
User Interface Improvements for a better User Experience
New color themes for a modern look
XWiki Enterprise 3.4 comes with a new default color theme and other three (Mint, Ruby and Dusk) that you can choose from. All four use CSS3 rules and new color variables in order to be able to have gradients. All color themes that were previously available are now considered deprecated and have been published as extensions: Default, Bordo, Nature, BlueSky, Inner Dark, Nightfall and Peach.
In order to solve this problem you have two solutions: adjust your custom color themes with the new changes or don't upgrade the following wiki pages when upgrading the XAR: ColorThemes.DefaultColorTheme, ColorThemes.ColorThemeTemplate, XWiki.AdminSheet, colorThemeInit.vm and the following CSS files from Colibri skin: colibri.css and ie-all.css.
If you were using one of the deprecated colorthemes, please change the colortheme to one of the new bundled compatible ColorThemes: Default, Mint, Ruby or Dusk.
Revamped Administration UI
We have redesigned the administration application providing a new layout and new icons (designed by Ciprian Amaritei). Administration sections are now grouped in several categories displayed using a vertical menu. Each section has been modified in order to be consistent with our Vertical Layout Usage Form Standard. The sections have been reorganized as well, making them more intuitive.
The WYSIWYG content editor can now be easily configured from the wiki administration. Look for the WYSIWYG Editor section under Applications category. You may still need to scan the list of available plugins and features in order to know what to enable. In the future we're hoping to integrate this information in the administration section.
A new UI for changing user avatars
Attachment Selector Macro is now bundled with XWiki Enterprise.
The UI for changing the user's avatar has been modified to use the attachment selector macro:
Live suggestions for the search input
This release introduces the first iteration on a "suggestions as you type" feature for the search box.
The suggestions proposed come from several sources, configurable in the wiki administration under the Search Suggest section. The sources configured by default include "Document name", "Document content", "Attachment name", "Attachment content" and "Users".
Better Dashboard editing
Automatic hiding of the top menu
The action menu is now minimized when the page is scrolled. You can access it by hovering the top of the browser window.
Better looking icons
Bonus: Infrastructure changes
Fork us on GitHub!
XWiki Enterprise 3.1 was the first version to be released from our new repository on github. We decided that git was sufficiently advanced over svn, our old version control system, that it warranted the effort spent to convert. If you are a developer who uses git then you already know what this means to you, you can participate in the XWiki development process by forking (git speak for copying) the source repository rather than being forced to provide patches to the benevolent committers who will accept or reject your patches at their pleasure. If you want to make something great but there's a part of the XWiki core which is holding you up, you can go right ahead and fork it into your own repository where you can fix it and share the results. We are excited to learn what you will create!
As a consequence, the structure of the repositories, the version numbers of the applications, plugins and build tools, as well as the structure of the projects on the issue tracker have changed. We moved all the plugins and applications inside the platform core, releasing them all together. This is also reflected in the issue tracker, where all the individual projects for each extension disappeared, since applications are now jira components inside the XWiki Platform project. This means that the version number confusion will stop, since everything has the same release version.
