Table of contents | |
Preamble | |
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About me | |
I'm an Electrical Engineering undergrad at the University of California, San Diego. My programming experience includes C/C++, Java, and various shell languages. A linux convert, I have experience in the administration of both Windows and Linux, although the later focuses almost entirerly on RHEL4. I have yet to learn any PHP. |
What I'm Good For | |
My strengths come from my dedication, teamwork, positive attitude, and desire to make things better. I have an inherent interest in the quality control of products and am an excellent writer (especially for an engineer!). I also have a lot of experience writing technical documentation. |
My TW Experiences | |
I've been using TW off and on for well over a year now (probably pushing 2-3 years, actually). I was first drawn to it because of its impressive documentation and extensive features list. Development also seemed to be quite rapid. I consider TW one of the best CMS's out there. It has many strengths but several key weaknesses that I'd like to see improved. |
What I'd like to do | |
In the future, I'd like to write and cleanup documentation about TW. Having legible, easy to follow documentation makes life better for EVERYONE. Eventually, it would be nice to have the oppurtunity to give more direct feedback to the developers and perhaps write some of my own (minor) patches. Obviously I need to learn some PHP. ;)
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TW Advantages: | |
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Lots of features, only 1 website. | |
This advantage can't be praised enough; uniformity is a POWERFUL tool as it minimizes the amount of work a user needs to do to achieve his or her goal. Having to manage (and incorporate!) a ))MediaWiki(( site, blogging software, and additional software for other features is a pain to set up and a nightmare to manage. Being able to use a single syntax in your blog, a wiki page, and a forum post is one of those things that users take for granted and TW does extremely well.
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Authentication Mechanisms | |
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Backups, Export Wiki Pages | |
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Templates | |
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Modules/Menus | |
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CATEGORIES! | |
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TW Disadvantages: | |
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CATEGORIES! | |
Tags are kind of one dimensional however, in that you can't really see how any two tags relate except by seeing objects that do (and don't) share the same tags. My solution to this in another project was a hybrid tree/tag structure. This allows some basic inheritance in case you want "context specific" tagging. In addition, more objects should able to be categorized; infact, any object should be able to be categorized. Wiki pages, Articles, Forum posts, (single) Question-Answer pairs, etc, should all be taggable. Instead of listing a FAQ in the current way (where you first create a FAQ, then add questions to it), you'd create questions, tag them, and then use a special Group Tag to effectively categorize many questions (dynamically!) into a single FAQ. More on these ideas later.
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Rapid development without feature stabilization | |
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Bizarre configuration system | |
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Poor documentation (but getting better!) | |
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Terrible Developer<->Community Feedback | |
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Features I'd Like To See / Changes I'd Like To See | |
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More advanced WYSIWIG Editor | |
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Per post categorization of blog entires. | |
When reading someones blog, it's desirable to have all entries shown to you by default and THEN select a categorization mechanism. This is how most blogs are designed and I've found that this is the most intuitive (ie, user friendly) methodology. Using multiple blogs each with a different category on a per user basis makes it too difficult for the reader to follow (who wants to click through 7 blogs just to find your latest post?). Of course, you don't have to limit users to one blog each, that's just an opinion |
More Quicktags / Plugins Menu | |
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Do one thing, do it well, and THEN do something else | |
I'm critical of TW because I love TW. I want to see it become the best CMS out there, as it is one of the ONLY CMSs that has all the features I want in one place. I'd just like to see it implement those features in a better manner than it currently does to make the site easier to navigate, easier to manage, and easier to improve! |
Cleaned up Modules (Menus) | |
Wiki
In my opinion, it should simply look like this: Wiki
The Wiki link would work as it does now (link to Wiki HomePage). Clicking on the Search link would open a page offering you a variety of options and allowing you to...
Wiki
Where search would be the same as above, My User Page would load ))UserPageUsername((, and My Pages would perform a search for wiki pages with Username as the author. Admins could then have the Structures link, a link to the Administration: Wiki page, etc. I realize that these changes may sound cosmetic, but I'm fairly certain there's some coding that would have to be done ;) If nothing else, it's beyond my ability to implement. |
Stuff That Needs Fixin' That I'm Too Lazy To File A Bug Report For | |
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More helpful error messages | |
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Problem | |
I noticed when trying to send a user message that I recieved an error message notifying me that I must enable user messaging in my user profile (+1 for clarity). It then gave rough directions on how to do this (+1 for mentioning where to go). |
Solution | |
Add a link directly to User Preferences. Or, even better, say something like "You currently have messages disabled in your user preferences. To enable them, click here". Clicking the link would enable messaging in your preferences and send you off to the page you were trying to get to. |