[Moin-devel] UI changes

[Michael Geary]

Hi Thomas,

> > I got rid of the icons completely. To me, they seem to be
> > one of the most confusing things about a MoinMoin wiki.
> > Some user actions are text links, some are icons. Some
> > are at the top of the page, some are at the bottom.
>
> As most design things, most of these things also have
> advantages. Just one example:
> If the edit button or icon was just at top of the page, what
> would you have to do after reading a (longer) page, when
> you decide to edit it? Yes, you would have to scroll back to
> top just to hit "edit". That's why the button is also at bottom.

Good point! I thought about deleting the Edit link at the bottom, but now I
think I'll keep it.

Now that you mention it, maybe I'll duplicate the entire navibar at the
bottom of the page for the same reason--suppose you've scrolled to the
bottom of a page and now you want to visit another Random page. OTOH, if I
change to a sidebar this wouldn't work as well.

> >* Changed the page name escaping to make prettier URLs.
> > Spaces turn into underscores
>
> Great. That was on my wishlist, too.
>
> > and hyphens remain unchanged (because I use them a lot).
> > Special characters use =XX instead of _XX. For example, my
> > personal page titled "Michael Geary - Software Inventor"
> > would have this partial URL in a standard MoinMoin wiki:
> >
> >Michael_20Geary_20_2d_20Software_20Inventor
> >
> >Yuck! On my site, it's simply:
> >
> >Michael_Geary_-_Software_Inventor
> >
>
> Nice. Why not %XX as standard describe?

Funny you should mention that. As soon as I changed it from _XX to =XX, I
asked myself that same question. So I tried %XX but it didn't work right
away. I didn't feel like debugging it at the time, so I went back to =XX for
the time being. I may revisit this and will probably allow some more
characters to go unescaped as well. I've got a lot of pages with various
punctuation marks in their titles, and I'd like to let as many of those as
possible appear just as they are in URLs.

> > * Changed the Edit page quite a bit. It always shows the
> > preview, and the preview is to the right of the editing area
> > so you don't have to scroll up and down. (This works better
> > for most but not all pages, so I'm going to add an option to
> > use the old edit style with the preview below the edit area.)
> >
> Would have to try that to tell if I like it.

Stop by www.geary.com when you get a chance and try it out. I like the side
by side editing for most pages, but for very wide pages it doesn't work as
well. It is also a bit annoying that the preview ends up being a lot
narrower than the original page view. Sometimes I end up resizing the
window's width manually when I edit it--so I may experiment with using a bit
of JavaScript to widen the window when you edit a page. Not sure if I'll
like that or not, will have to try it and see.

I am also thinking about using two frames, one for the edit stuff and one
for the preview, with an option to split horizontally or vertically (and
maybe an option to use the frames or not).

I saw one wiki that opens the preview in a separate window--I don't recall
which one it was--but that seems like it might run afoul of popup stoppers.

> >None of this is "done", of course--I've got lots of other
> changes in mind.
> >
> Maybe try to complete some of them before you begin new
> ones ;) It is easier to include well-done and well-tested code,
> than half-ready code.

Oh, what I meant was that I'm not done making UI changes, not that the
changes so far are half-baked. :-) Most of the code is pretty clean,
although there are a few place where I've hard coded strings that should be
config options. I'll tidy those up and start posting my patches soon.

> > * I plan to put all of the navigation links in a sidebar instead
> > of at the top and bottom of the page.
>
> That's for skins, that's planned anyway.

Ah, that will be nice. Something along the lines of what TWiki does,
perhaps?

> > * I want to turn off WordsSmashedTogetherLikeSo links
> > entirely--they really make things confusing when someone
> > named McGeary tries to add a page. :-)
> > But I'd have to edit all the help files to do this. Maybe I'll
> > hack it so that anything beginning with Help still works as
> > a WikiName but nothing else does.
>
> That would be an ugly thing, because it would be inconsistent.

Good point. Maybe a better idea would be to add a "#pragma wikilinks off"
option and put that at the top of my standard page template. That way
McGeary doesn't get confused when his name turns into a hyperlinked "Mc
Geary" (because I've turned on the space insertion option by default). Of
course, seeing "#pragma wikilinks off" may be confusing too--but people will
probably figure it's something they should leave alone. :-)

Or maybe I'll get ambitious and write a little script to run through all the
page text files and change EveryWikiLink to ["Every Wiki Link"] and rename
the files accordingly. Then I can add a config option to disable WikiLinks
globally and still have everything work.

More likely, I'll get lazy and leave this the way it is! :-)

Thanks for all the feedback,

Mike