Redesign of Orxonox website

[x3n]

Yeah maybe, but that doesn't sound like good idea to me

when talking about subdirectories, I usually think about the Pixhawk wiki (a project I worked on and also helped to structure the wiki a little). It allows arbitrary deeply nested subdirectories, for example like this:
http://pixhawk.ethz.ch/software/compute ... amera/lens

The navigation to the left represents the directory structure, which gives the whole wiki a natural structure.

[adi]

The only other project management application that comes in to my mind is Redmine, i'ts comparable to Trac and worth a try.

Just don't use Origo, please.

[The Jo]

As far as I know you have some experience with wiki-systems [...]

So far I have only learned how to use MediaWiki Software as a wiki admin for about two years. I've concentrated my work mainly on content creation, basic design issues and community management- and not on coding, unfortunately.

What I missed was the ability to categorize pages on trac wiki. It's just easier to find articles if they're in a certain category.
Another usefull tool I used were wiki templates. I think it should be possible to create a "catalogue" with any wiki software that allows to use categories and templates.

The idea of creating sub-domains was a little bit extreme
I just wanted to emphasize how important a clear structure was for me.

By the way: What functions do we want our new wiki software to have? This is the key question to decide what kind of software we need.

[beni]

Just so you guys are not totally confused: I merged the two topics, because the subject is exactly the same. Surely the post order got a little jumbled up, but I think it's better like this, so we don't have to discuss on two fronts about the same thing.

Well the trac wiki doesn't have many functions, so I think we would welcome anything with a little more structure. One thing though might be of use: If the wiki login function could be hijacked and used by other systems (or the other way around). Besides that I only see templates and categories. I would also like to use the wiki as a homepage, so the design should be more or less appealing and the newbie user shouldn't be confronted with too much when arriving at orxonox.net

Oh and redmine looks really nice. That's what I'd like. There's not much more that I need except a redesign. I don't know about the wiki functionalities of redmine though..

[x3n]

jeez, I'm totally confused now

By the way: What functions do we want our new wiki software to have? This is the key question to decide what kind of software we need.

When we recently talked about this matter in IRC, I made an incomplete list of things that annoy me with trac. That doesn't mean that the new system has to be better in all points, but at least in some. So here's the list, slightly updated (sorry, it's german):

1. es logt mich jedesmal aus wenn ich den browser schliesse
2. die formatierung ist unter aller sau, gibt ausser fett und kursiv praktisch keine möglichkeiten
3. keine gruppierung / boxen möglich (so was wie hier: http://www.ogre3d.org/tikiwiki/tiki-index.php)
4. keine klapptexte die man verstecken / anzeigen kann
5. keine gruppierung der seiten in ordner/unterordnet möglich
6. keine navigation, das zeugs das wir teilweise rechts haben (siehe hier, TracNav: http://www.orxonox.net/wiki/development), müssen wir von hand aktualisieren
7. bilder, und wenn es nur kleine icons sind, muss man hochladen und dann erscheint unten ne sinnlose liste von dem zeugs, blöd wenn man icons auf mehreren seiten braucht
8. keine makros möglich
9. keine plugins <- stimmt nicht, es gibt plugins, aber wir haben regelämssig probleme damit weil sich die css files in die quere kommen
10. kein richtiger admin bereich
11. man kann seiten nicht verschieben/umbenennen
12. keine anzeige von verwaisten seiten oder toten links
13. man kann die seiten nur als ganzes editieren, insbesondere bei längeren seiten ist das extrem unübersichtlich (andere wikis erlauben das ändern von einzelnen paragraphen)

So to summarize this, I'd like to have the following features:

1. Better formatting, especially to structure the text (boxes and tables, maybe floats, hide/show text with javascript).
floats are actually possible in trac, but it's not really nice. an example from the development site:

Code: Select all

{{{
#!div width="50%" style="background-color: #F7F7F7; border: 1px solid #888888; margin: 5px; padding: 10px; width: 46%; float: left;"
...
}}}

2. better structure of the wiki pages, for example with subdirectories or maybe tags (there's a plugin for trac that allows tags, but we don't have it and I don't know if it's good). Also a navigation box that reflects the structure (or subdirectories) of the sites, something like we use here: http://www.orxonox.net/wiki/development (but currently we have to do this manually).

3. Maybe a separated section for files instead of attaching them to a wiki page

4. Ability to define macros (in the wiki itself, not directly on the server in python or whatever, like we currently have to do it with trac)

5. Maybe a better plugin system that doesn't interfer with our style sheets and doesn't rely on jquery or similar.

6. More tools to increase the usability: For example to edit single paragraphs, list orphan sites, dead links, etc.

[beni]

*BUMP*

What's with this, guys? I just had a discussion with another PPS student about the problems of the Archive of Wikipages and he made some good points about accessibly of the right information.

I know that there is a lot of work involved with this change, but the idea is, to become more productive after these changes, so I think the effort is worth it.

For me I like the idea of a discussion page like on Wikipedia or similar things (like an Archivepage).

Once we have decided on the wiki we can talk about the integration process, of other functions like bugtracking, ticketing system and documentation. After that we can look at a comprehensive design.

[greenman]

i think we should go for either doku wiki or tiki wiki
i'm not sure, but i think mediawiki is the least configureable (of the 3) in terms of style and appearance.

i think a key point for the new wiki system should be the svn support.
maybe we can start choosing by comparing svn browsers of the different wiki systems

[beni]

Okay I looked at DokuWiki:

Pros:

• It seems to be very easy to maintain.
• There is a plugin manager and there already exist templates to change it's design.
• The syntax is similar to MediaWiki which makes the source code of the pages readable.
• grouping and hierarchy of pages possible

Cons:

• There is no SVN Browser
• No ticketsystem
• No bugtracker
• Images seem to be bound to a page as well.
• ... however some of these features can be integrated with plugins.

And tiki wiki is down.. so I couldn't check it out. They seem to have a problem with allocating memory. Sounds like a familiar php problem. ^^

[x3n]

we can easily use an external svn browser (i'd prefer to keep trac for this matter).

[Mozork]

DokuWiki doesn't look too bad (except maybe that it uses textfiles as storage and doesn't support MySQL).
Making Mediawiki look the way we want shouldn't be too difficult, though. It has a lot of features is well supported and doesn't seem bloated.
DokuWiki and Tiki Wiki (the latter especially) seem to be almost full fledged CMS, so as the main part of the Orxonox website I guess they would indeed make more sense than just a wiki (such as Mediawiki).

Keeping trac for what it's good at (SVN integration and maybe tickets), seems absolutely reasonable to me.

[x3n]

list of project management systems with some rumour in parentheses:

http://trac.edgewall.org/ (many plugins, maybe slow development, not so good without plugins)
http://www.redmine.org/ (clean design, many plugins)
http://retrospectiva.org/ (new project, not so many plugins)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:F ... t_software

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pr ... t_software

[Mozork]

The last one (retrospectiva) looks nice and at first glance seems to have everything we would need.
Redmine looks quite nice, too, and seems to have a lot of neat features.

[x3n]

I just found an awesome site which compares different wiki systems:
http://www.wikimatrix.org/

The TracWiki (this is what we currently use) is also listed. As expected it lacks many usability features. I coudn't find the wikis that may (or may not) be included with the project management systems from my last post in this thread (redmine, confluence), but using the wikimatrix we have at least some sort of a checklist if we ever find time to test one of these systems.

Wikimatrix with TracWiki, MediaWiki, Tiki Wiki, and DokuWiki:
http://www.wikimatrix.org/compare/TracW ... e+DokuWiki

(Note the last point in the Extras section, "Ticket System". Looks like this is a common feature among wiki systems.)

[BadElvis]

Yesterday I was toying arounf a bit with TikiWiki. It seems to be developed very actively. The developers themselves use TikiWiki as a project management platform to develop TikiWiki (though I wonder with what they developed TikiWiki 1.0...).

First, I tried the TikiWiki 7 beta version. The install worked like a charm and I got it running within a few minutes, this was really impressive. The result looked very promising and it has a ton of modules that can be added to the site. There were some features that didnt behave "correctly" because it is still a beta version (it said they were not broken but deliberately modified for development purposes). Then I tried the latest stable version of TikiWiki. It installed correctly as well but the website didn't work. No menu or navigation showed up and it was pretty much unusable. I suggest to wait until version 7 is stable and then give it a try.

At the moment, I have the beta version running at http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~felischu/tiki/. The password for admin is my surname. Feel free to create yourself an account or test configurations.

Cheers!

[x3n]

Thanks for testing. Tiki Wiki is also one of my favorites after seeing the Ogre Wiki and the information on wikimatrix.org.

Unfortunately the beta seems a bit unstable, I can not really log in. Maybe a bug with the cookie.