GroupWiki – Demo Site (Please provide feedback.Release imminent!)
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Hi everyone.
I’ve just got the demo site for our GroupWiki plugin up and running. Please can you head on over and test it a bit One we’ve got some feedback from this and implemented some fixes/refactoring, we aim to release the plugin code as soon as possible.
GroupWiki Site:
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Congratulations, DCartwright. Looking good Other than seeing by chance that there is Wiki page or new wiki entry in the sitewide activities, will you be adding a navigation tab along with Groups, Members, etc. Wiki so that members can see that there is a Wiki feature/directory page? Just like Forums link where forums are dependent on groups, so are Wiki’s. Or… we could just hardcode the link
Do you mean something like the forum/users/groups directory? I would definitely like to add something like that but sadly it will have to wait until after the initial project release/deadline as we are pretty much out of time and need to concentrate on bug-fixing at the moment. I do plan to look at a few things asap in my own time (though that is sadly very limited) and that would probably be one of my priorities
I also would recommend joining up to the site and creating your own group so you can see the admin functions for the group wiki. You have a fairly fine grain of control over the wiki pages…
InactiveLooks really good. I just joined your site and created a group… also the admin features are great!
Is it maybe possible that you sent me the plugin please? (I know its still in development, but I like to test it too!)
I would be glad to use it on my new BP site on http://www.mymape.com!
One we can get the plugin code into a decent state you’re more then welcome to it Unfortunately I can’t release WIP code early as I wouldn’t want to run any risks of breaking your site.
It won’t belong now though, with luck.
Hi DCartwright. Yup joined up to test the Wiki plugin.
Initial feedback
1. Nice – got a pop-up reminder after some minutes to save work.
2. I can’t delete my revisions, at least those which I consider disposable – is the deletion of such revisions for Site Admin only or will you allow Group creator/admins to delete such later on?
3. I’m signing on as volunteer to attempt to create directory page for the Wiki plugin – read “attempt”
Thanks.
Alert: – Just noticed that each Save/Revision of that one Wiki page I was working on are included in the activity stream for the Group I created as well as in the Home page
1. Amazing work, guys
2. I can see great usage for communities of people who have a clue what a wiki is and how to best use it
3. Curious on how this great plugin might best be used on a community like mine which is chock full of noobs that need to be lead by hand down every path? My gut tells me they will balk unless I make big fat buttons explaining everything. in fact, I may have to disguise the fact that it’s even a wiki!
@DCCartwright – i think it’s a winner. I think you’ll find a lot of interest in this… Folks have hacked it (mediawiki) together in various ways..and you might benefit from a team effort with some of these guys that have done so.
1. Glad that is working okay. It’s something that I only implemented on Friday so it may need some tweaking
2. At the moment there is no facility to delete revisions. Something to look at in future I guess. For now, we want pretty much everything saved as it’s all student work. If we were to put something in there I’d imagine it would be an admin function to clear individual revisions/all revisions older than x amount of time or ‘all’ revisions.
3. That sounds great Our project finishes in a week or so, so we can chat about this after that.
4. (The alert) – I’m not sure what you mean here. Please can you explain further?
1. Thanks
2 + 3. I definitely see your point here. We have tried to make it as accessible as possible to people that are non-technical. I’m sure there are things that can be improved upon on that front though. One thing that might be quite nice (suggested by one of the other developers, Ryo) is to make it so that by default the wiki pages are created with some kind of basic instructions – perhaps an instructional video. Not something we’ll be doing now but having a backend admin function that lets you control that might be good.
Thanks for the link. We originally looked at using mediawiki for this project but it turned out to be a big of a nightmare to integrate the systems nicely. See this post for a few more details: https://buddypress.org/forums/topic/group-wiki-plugin-not-a-release-but-in-progress
Great work! I haven’t had the time for a detailed test, but i have some short feadback for the beginning:
1. Everything works fine and seems logical. Thats great. There could be some front-end twaeks, but i will come back later next week with some more detailed ideas and mockups.
2. From our experience it is great to have advanced edit functions but hide them in a second row from the avarage user (like the wordpress backend editor does). For a wiki article the user (students) should focus on the content instead of any fancy formating. Basic options could be a select-box for h1, h2, h3 (this is important and must be easy accessible, because it will build the toc and people should get used to it) bold, italic, url link, unordered list, and numberd list. Everything else could go in a second or third row which appears if you click some “advanced options” button.
3. (future release) A searchable wiki directory page with all public pages.
4. (future release) “Suggest a wiki page” button so that non admin-members could ask the admin to create a new wiki page for them.
5. (future release) non-admin wiki page creation
Seconding 21cdb suggestions
@DCartwright – the alert re each “Save/Revision of that one Wiki page I was working on are included in the activity stream for the Group I created as well as in the Home page”
– I was creating the one Wiki page in one sitting while watching the news So when the prompt to save came up or I needed to create MSWord doc to test copy and paste formatting result on wiki page, etc. etc. etc., I saved the page.
– Therefore, alert to self and users, create the Wiki page in another app and copy and paste from there so that “Revision” would only show completion of actual revision not page saves.
1. Sounds good
2. I personally didn’t really like this, but it would be incredibly simple to change – initially I’ll include details on how to make it work like this (basically to make it exactly the same as the WP backend) and perhaps in the future it could be something modifiable in the backend.
3. Lots of people seem to like the idea of a directory. It should be looked into, definitely
4. + 5. It’s likely that non-admin page creation would come before a ‘suggest a page’ feature…mostly because if I get the chance I want to look into non-admin created pages tonight
Sorry if I’m being dense here but i’m still not 100% sure I follow. I think the second part of the behaviour is correct – each time you save, a revision should be created. I think the thing that is going wrong is that the activity stream is getting too many updates – i.e. if you change a page 10 times in 10 minutes, only the latest update should appear in the activity stream. Does that sound right?
Ah..I think I realise part of what you meant now. I’ve hopefully fixed this issue. Please can you re-test and let me know? Thanks
@D Cartwright – Just retested, thank you. Since I’ll be actively developing the Wiki (as Site Admin creating the Pages) I didn’t want to see my avatar and wiki page saves taking over the activity streams in my Groups and the Home Page when I take my sweet time doing edits and saving the pages, I’m the shy type
As for known bugs per http://namoo.co.uk/groups/bpgw-guide/wiki/how-to-guide/
#2. Currently the GroupWiki seems to be displaying in the My Blogs area for some users.
– it didn’t for me. It was exactly where it was supposed to be
#3. The “also currently editing” warning isn’t amazingly clear and also leaves an annoying yellow highlight box near the top left. Something to fix.
– per reply to your message at GroupWiki earlier, I didn’t notice/see the “also currently editing” warning at all. Most probably because of tunnel vision – I was playing like a kid with the styles of the table I just inserted in the page with a math test. I had right answer, just need to have superscript inserted there
Thanks again.
1) I think you’ll still see a lot of activity stream updates but it should only consist of actual updates (e.g. when you add a new line of text/etc)……hopefully anyhow
2) Unfortunately the workaround for this has been to make it so that the main admin account (assuming account #1 in the WP db) gets lumbered with this. Hopefully I’ll get something nicer sorted in future. It doesn’t look that hard to do but would just involve a bit more work using the lower level functions rather than the higher level wpmu ones.
3) Lol. No worries. I do have a few plans for improvements in that area but nothing too drastic. Warnings about (other) people saving and slightly quicker updates regarding people no longer editing the post might be nice.
Frontend wiki page creation for non-admins
Test group here: http://namoo.co.uk/groups/frontend-page-creation-testing/
I’ve implemented initial support for frontend page creation by non-group admins. This feature is disabled by default in groups but can be enabled at group creation or in the group admin screen. Basically this allows members of groups to create their own wiki pages at will.
Warning: Currently only group admins can ‘remove’ these pages and group members aren’t limited in any way in regards to how many pages they can create. Also worth noting: the navigation styles have *not* been built with this in mind. As this feature is outside of the scope of our current project I can’t guarantee that decent styling will be forthcoming anytime soon either (my css skills are le suck and Ryo has way too much work on to be distracted by me getting carried away with extra features this late into the project)
@dcartwright – kudos. Successfully created a new wiki page as non-admin. And yeah, as long as group admin and site admin can delete the page, that’s cool.
Cheers
Great, thanks for testing it.
As mentioning on Namoo, the loading image and ajax implementation for that particular piece of page creation is something that will be improved further down the line – once time isn’t such an issue
Non-admin page creation works great! This is super simple an will encourage people to be more active! Small detail but great impact! I would suggest to move the create a wiki page box to the top.
Since there is a Group Wiki Directory Table that shows all pages, what is the benefit of having all pages listed on top? It looks kind of clunky and confusing?
I did a little mockup to clarify what i mean: http://i47.tinypic.com/15r0di0.png
By the way the Group Wiki Directory Table seems to be a good starting point for a global Wiki Directory Page.
Great work! This plugin will become super useful especially if you use buddypress for students! Great first RC!
EDIT: I just looked at the mockup and saw that i added vertical-align: top instead of middle. Just if someone is wondering.
EDIT 2: @David: I can understand the benefit of showing all buttons on the editor, but i also know how confusing all these buttons are for avarage users. It’s easier for a tech user to press a button for advanced options instead of confusing avarage users with to many buttons. But sure, thats personal taste.
agreed 21cdb, I also think the pages listed on top are confusing. Looks better without those I think.
@21cb: I haven’t actually posted in this thread yet… but fwiw… I agree with you
@21cdb and @bpisimone
That mockup looks nice. It definitely seems a good way to go but I don’t think we’ll be able to change to that just yet. Once our project site has launched I should have a bit more time to polish up things like this though
/re edit2: You’re absolutely right. I found that a lot of our students never really looked at the ‘extra buttons’ options so I was hoping to give them as many functions that they would recognise from MS Word as possible. I’ll definitely include instructions on how to modify this to suit people’s needs/tastes though
Pah, me and Ryo have been waiting for your feedback. What’s going on? :p
Latest version of the plugin uploaded to the demo site. Updates include: a warning if you’re editing a page and someone else saves, various bits of cleanup, Stuart has started to add the comment deletion code (not finished yet though, so don’t be surprised when it doesn’t work), sorted some weird behaviour in the activity stream for wiki updates, fixed attached image/file display in the revisions area, various other little fixes and bits.
We’re in bug-fix mode from here on so please mention anything remotely dodgy you notice
@D. Sorry… crazy busy with freelance work at the moment.
No worries. Until recently I was the same…and as of next week I’ll be the same again. Woo :S
Hi again.
Just letting everyone know that the latest version of the plugin is now on the site. Various issues have been fixed, including:
CSS issues for the edit buttons/etc on pages
Wordpress image edit plugin for tinymce now implemented (still a few css issues there though)
Wiki ‘blogs’ appearing where they shouldn’t is fixed
Lots of other stuff I’ve forgotten or not aware of because Stuart/Ryo have fixed
I’ve also added support for wiki edits and wiki comments in the activity stream filters.
I doubt the plugin will be released this week but I’m hoping for early next week. Once again, any feedback would be greatly appreciated
If anyone is interested in getting email notifications for group activities/updates, please also check out this: https://buddypress.org/forums/topic/new-plugin-group-activity-stream-email-notifications
Tested it DCartwright. Good luck on the site wiki launch next week
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