Meetings

Proposal: 21:00 GMT Monday December 10th, 2007 for an audio and/or chat and/or a cardmeeting

Meeting notes: AdminUIRevamp20071210

Background information

Tikiwiki has more features out-of-the box than any other CMS or groupware package out there. Experienced Tiki admins know how great and efficient it is. All features are just a few clicks away. No need to find, download and install 3rd party modules/plugins. However, the admin panel is huge and confusing in some places. So you do need to hunt to find the right checkbox. For new admins that just want a wiki or just want a blog, they could be tempted to use a simpler package.

Historically, when Tikiwiki developers add new features, they often add the option (because it's one of our 3 Rules) somewhat randomly in tiki-admin.php?page=features For example, "Calendar manual selection of time/date" should be in tiki-admin.php?page=calendar instead.

We had a TikiFest and a CardMeeting session on this topic in June 2007. Some work has been done here in Tiki 1.9.8 (vs 1.9.7) but it was more to solve the biggest issues than a true clean up.

Many things were improved in 1.10 vs 1.9.8

• Most icons were updated to nicer ones
• Many aspects were cleaned up
• Assign permission is faster.
• etc

But we can still do better!

Solution

Re-work the admin panels to be easy, fun & intuitive for new Tiki admins. These changes must be fairly quickly added to BRANCH-1-10 (before the freeze) and before too many screenshots are made for the Tiki 1.10 documentation.

With new panels and a proper re-organization of the current admin panels, it should make it pretty obvious for devs to add their new options in the appropriate place (and for admins to find them!). It is OK to have a setting in more than one admin panel, when it's relevant to both. However, the admin only needs to set it once.

The focus here is on making it intuitive to administer which is a distinct focus than Edit User Interface Revamp, which is how to make it more intuitive to participate to content creation. The focus is also different than Infrastructure Revamp, which is to improve install/upgrade/backup/security. AdminUIRevamp ideas assumes that install went correctly. Of course, some individual tracker items can overlap in more than one project.

This will include

• Re-organizing things in admin panels
• Icon work
• Adding tips and links to documentation
• Changing some of the default settings to more intuitive settings (what most people would use)
• WYSIWYCA (if someone uses Tiki just for blogs, it should be simple, without extra options/features)
• Hiding some more advanced/rarely used features in something like "expert mode"
• Possibly some interactive wizards to setup some features.
• Whatever you think is needed.

  
  

People who spends some time on training, documentation, forums and support know where new Tiki admins have questions. New admins are also great to give feedback on what was difficult to understand. If you don't have coding skills, don't worry. If you have a good idea, someone will code it!

People

• Luci
• Marc Laporte
• Dthacker
• You?

  
  

Steps

1. Decide how we will coordinate (hopefully dogfooding trackers)
2. Recruit contributors & facilitate input.
3. Scanning all tracker items on the wishlist and identifying & prioritizing the ones that relate to this project.
4. Get as many as possible of the items done, in order of priority (see below importance vs easiness).

How to determine priorities?

There will always be more ideas & feature requests than people available that can work on them. In this context, how do we choose what to do first?

Let's try

1. To involve more people so we can get more done.
2. To focus on things which affect the most people. So let's fix things in transversal features before things that are specific and not everyone uses. ex.: user administration vs tiki maps.
3. Pick all the low-hanging fruit first (Do the easy stuff)
4. To be pragmatic
5. To make optional a feature that should have been optional before

Let's avoid

1. Trying to be perfect. There are diminishing returns to investing more & more time on something. Perfection is the enemy of good enough (Voltaire). It will always be possible to improve later on. That's the beauty of a unified code base like Tiki.
2. Being dogmatic about "how it was done before". Yes, we want to respect the past. However, in many cases, things were done without much thought and the original author would be just as happy or even happier to have done it the way we'll do it now.
3. The temptation of adding new features. The goal here is to re-organize what we already have. It's a low-risk operation. Adding a simple option (checkbox to activate/deactivate something in an existing feature is ok though)

Timeframe

2007-11-23	project launched
Early December	Audio conference call of luci, marclaporte and whoever is interested to review all tracker items and discuss priorities
December & January	implementing the chosen ideas