Features / Usability

> It hard to get a point of view, without being at that point. Slowly I will turn into a TikiWiki veteran and hence will move from the newbie's point to veteran's point. Some of the things which a newbie to TikiWiki.org feel uncomfortable might be obvious second nature, to a veteran.
>
> Here r some of the things that I felt uncomfortable with, as a newbie to TikiWiki website.
>
> 1) The forum should be accessible from the TikiWiki homepage. This I think is the major reason why there is very less communication in the forums. Forum should always receive focus, both from website designers and users.

Please request this at dev.tikiwiki.org in the wishlist. I happen to agree!
>
> 2) Why do I have to login separately every now and then inside tikiwiki.org, doc.tikiwiki.org etc. One single login should persist. There is no point in repeatedly logging in, when the same username/password set works.

The tiki site family uses a utility called intertiki to propagate your login across all sites. It's not perfect, and sometimes it loses touch with a site.
>
> 3) Why do templates change as I move across the Tiki website. Blue templates here, green after sometime. Consistent templates look better.

We're in the process of a major theme upgrade. Things may look different for awhile.
>
> I hope my observations as a newbie will help. I might edit the post in the future. Byeeeeee. TikiWiki is gr8.

Observations are helpful. Digging in and contributing is even more helpful. Please consider giving back to the project by helping with coding, documentation, or testing.

Dave

> It hard to get a point of view, without being at that point. Slowly I will turn into a TikiWiki veteran and hence will move from the newbie's point to veteran's point. Some of the things which a newbie to TikiWiki.org feel uncomfortable might be obvious second nature, to a veteran.
>
> Here r some of the things that I felt uncomfortable with, as a newbie to TikiWiki website.
>
> 1) The forum should be accessible from the TikiWiki homepage. This I think is the major reason why there is very less communication in the forums. Forum should always receive focus, both from website designers and users.

Probably more visibility could be given to the forums here. I wasn't aware that they were underused because people weren't aware of them. One trade-off we have to consider is that every database call to load some "recent activity" information increases the page loading time, which already gets criticized because so much data is already being loaded.

> 2) Why do I have to login separately every now and then inside tikiwiki.org, doc.tikiwiki.org etc. One single login should persist. There is no point in repeatedly logging in, when the same username/password set works.

Even though these have the same top-level domain, they are actually on different servers. From earlier conversations, I'm not sure if it's possible to share logins across them. Using Intertiki to enable the other sites to share the main tikiwiki.org login and get usergroup information from tikiwiki.org does make things quite a bit easier for users.

> 3) Why do templates change as I move across the Tiki website. Blue templates here, green after sometime. Consistent templates look better.

What do you mean by Tiki website — http://tikiwiki.org? As far as I know, the theme is consistent here. If you mean info.tikiwiki.org, dev.tikiwiki.org, doc.tikiwiki.org, themes.tikiwiki.org, etc., these are actually different web sites. There was a suggestion to give all these sites the same style (theme), and maybe just vary the page-top color or something to distinguish each, so your observation is in line with this idea. I think when or after Tiki 1.10 is released, this might be implemented. (Of course on the other hand, there is the point of view that we want to illustrate how varied Tiki sites can be, so that's the other side to consider.)

> I hope my observations as a newbie will help. I might edit the post in the future. Byeeeeee. TikiWiki is gr8.

Thanks for your input.

-- Gary