Set of useful Macros

Version 1.2 by Vincent Massol on 2022/02/21 13:38

Mentor(s)
Estimated workload

175 hours (Medium size project)

Details

Develop a set of XWiki Rendering Macros to make it easy to perform well-defined tasks in XWiki for non-technical users. Right now everything is possible using the Scripting macros of XWiki. However that's reserved to technical users. The idea is to identify common needs and implement specific macros to fulfil those needs.

Goals & Ideas

  • Form macro + Button macros to avoid needing the use of HTML macro and very simply add a button or a form in a wiki page. See also Form in page FAQ
  • Search macro to display a Search box in a wiki page and to display search results, with possibility of passing search parameters.
  • Members macro to display all the members of a given Group into a LiveTable and/or a Tree
  • Contributors macro to display all the authors who have contributed to a wiki page.
  • Develop these new macro as XWiki Extensions on XWiki Contrib and release them.
  • Propose new macros if time permits it. Ideas can be taken from New macros idea list. Some of these macros have already been implemented but the implementation may not work anymore in the latest versions of XWiki or can be improved. Improving them using new technologies would be great.

Considerations

  • Regarding the form macro the idea is to design it and see if we can make it easy to implement some use cases. We should not do something generic or we'll be harder to use than HTML! It may not be a form macro but another name. Example of typical use case.
  • The goal of this project is to look at our pages and find common patterns and provide macros to help implement them more easily, bringing the ability to non devs to do powerful stuff in xwiki
  • There's a big part of the project at the start about researching, brainstorming and making spec proposal.
  • Another source of inspiration is to also look at the snippets and find useful ones that would make sense to be as macros for users to use
  • Yet another source of inspiration is to look at other wikis (such as Confluence) and find nice macros that we could have too.
  • Since it's easy to script in XWiki, we've often forgotten to create plenty of small macros that can be implemented with 1 or 2 lines of code but even writing these few lines can be hard for non-devs and having a read-to-use macro could them.
Developer profile

Technologies useful:

  • Javascript
  • HTML/CSS
  • Velocity
  • Possibly Java for some macros
Active
Yes
Year

2022

Status

Proposed

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