After 7 days of TikiFest (out of 10), we have basic workspaces (very flexible back-end, front-end getting polished)

[Marc Laporte-3]

Hi!

Here is a report of the TikiFest.

As a reminder, here are the "Issues to resolve"

1- Workspace users only want to see what is relevant to their workspace
2- Some contexts require privacy and to hide the work of a workgroup
3- Administrators want to delegate management of workspaces
4- Workspaces need to have a life of their own
5- Workspace leaders may need to customize the configurations locally

Full descriptions here:
http://dev.tikiwiki.org/workspace+Roadmap


The back-end is functional. Some more work needs to be done on group
transitions (perms on groups are already done)

To tyr it, you can checkout trunk and apply this profile:
http://profiles.tikiwiki.org/Jailroot_Demonstration

If you don't use SVN, you can download 4.0 here (daily snapshot):
http://dev.tikiwiki.org/Download#Pre_release_packages_zip_files_


Coming up:
1- It has not been deployed to all features yet. Normal behavior is:
if perspectives are "off", it should be the same behavior as before
(Tiki 3.0). On the short term, we will focus on making the workspaces
work well on the following features:

- Wiki
- Blogs
- File Galleries
- Forums
- Trackers

Then, over time, more & more features & modules will be made
"workspace/perspective" aware. This is a huge job to deploy this
everywhere. The more people help, the faster we'll get there!  Here is
how you can help:
http://dev.tikiwiki.org/Deployment+of+Category+Jail

Please note that for some of the less-maintained features (ex.: HTML
pages, Quizzes, etc.) it may take a long time before they are made
"workspace/perspective" aware (if ever!). That may mean that category
permissions are not deployed to them or the lists are not filtered
properly (http://dev.tikiwiki.org/WYSIWTSN and
http://dev.tikiwiki.org/WYSIWYCA issues). This being said, if you
don't use "workspace/perspective", it will be the same behavior as 3.0

With the resources we have available, I prefer to have workspaces as
complete as possible in 4.0 for a limited number of features, than to
have partial workspaces (ex.: missing organic groups), but that works
for all features. It's a debatable choice of course. However, the
sooner we get the features in, the sooner they will mature. And I
think cross-Tiki features like Organic / Emergent groups, Group
transitions, Category security, etc. provide more value.


2- For advanced/complex profiles we need the flexibility of wiki pages
/ profiles / data channels. Here are 10 examples that we can do over
the next few months (profiles can be made after 4.0 is released).
http://profiles.tikiwiki.org/Workspaces

I am very impressed with the flexibility provided by Louis-Philippe's
design. And also, even people that don't use/need workspaces will
benefit from general improvements (ex.: group perms)

On the short term, these 2 will be our focus:
http://profiles.tikiwiki.org/Project_Management
http://profiles.tikiwiki.org/Classroom
Régis & Xavi are leading this part.

3- Simpler interface to create simple workspaces. The setup above
(profiles / data channels) is when you need massive power (like
creating hundreds of classrooms or projects via data channels). Also
on radar is to have a simplified interface (Aldo & Ben showed us a
demo!). This will re-use the same libs but provide a way to create a
workspace (which is in fact a category), associate groups easily and
add items.

4- Better UI for all management (groups, perspectives, etc)
luci & Jonny are preparing some nice jQuery stuff for us!

5- Lots of bug fixes
Test, test, test, fix, fix, fix!

Some more updates:
Chealer is getting back into the code and hunting bugs
Sept_7 has just joined us, so we'll have more brainpower to progress!
Vladka has been working on some videos
Rodrigo has been steadily working on the MediaWiki importer. If you
have any MW data dumps to convert, please get in touch with him now.
He is in testing phase!
Sylvie has started deploying to some features.  I expect some tricky
but essential things ahead for trackers in workspaces.

Please note that some things (ex.: "Workspace leaders may need to
customize the configurations locally") will only be possible to manage
via profiles/data channels in 4.0
To be able to provide per workspace a GUI to override preference, we
need something like:
http://dev.tikiwiki.org/Dynamic+Preferences
And this is probably too much work for 4.0 (unless many volunteers
magically popup!)


So in a nutshell:

4.0: A robust/flexible backend for building complex workspaces with
the most important features
5.0: Deploying to more & more features and making the UI easier (and
less dependent on profiles).


Best regards,


--
Marc Laporte

http://MarcLaporte.com
http://TikiWiki.org/MarcLaporte
http://AvanTech.net
http://OurWiki.net

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