Moderate Your Navel Gazing and get coding!

Introspection is a good thing, and so is speculation and consensus building. But, when it goes on for 3 or more years with no measurable results, it's probably a bad thing. Until the last six months, this was the state of TWiki from my perspective. Stagnant. Not growing in the least. Critical features for a corporate environment not being developed.

What makes this happen? Lack of coders? That statement is probably not true, there are plenty of fine coders involved with TWiki. Lack of direction? No, there have been plenty of directions, take your pick. Speculation about what TWiki is to become has turned very much into a festering, bubbling boil which I think is going to POP very soon.

DakarRelease is the most divergent codebase I've seen in years, lending opportunity to change the way it works for the better. What I see currently just re-implements the same basic functionality in a different way (albeit with a lot of bug fixes and code usability improvements), but we have to start somewhere. Some of the new feature enhancements are still are so subtle, the casual user probably wouldn't notice. Somewhere someone said that the stated purpose of DakarRelease was to integrate the features of MegaTWiki (I don't remember exactly where). This is a good start from a simple user interface perspective (admin screens, etc), but we need to take it much farther after Dakar to give it some serious usability improvements.

What I want to see more of is a focus on defining new features that will gain TWiki more immediate acceptance with minimal cognitive investment on the user's part, without sacrificing or limiting the huge potential of TWiki, and more focus on how to implement those features. In my opinion, the next new set of features should focus on

• providing obvious mechanisms for ease of use
• ConceptMining?
• building synergy between concepts.

This requires a serious commitment by the idea contributors and the code developers to congeal and prioritize an ultimate feature list, along with a rash of UsabilityStudies from users (or potential users) who have minimal exposure to TWiki. Getting the code out also requries a serious commitment by the code developers who are good at coding to stick around long enough to work in the new features. Admittedly, I was absent from active participation for quite a while, so I have no excuse.

Pushing TWiki to the point of immediate corporate usability will probably require a technology shift, or a serious collection of Skins, Plugins and Addons.

-- PeterNixon - 01 Jul 2005

I thought DakarRelease is just about improving the performance. We could do all the nice little feature enhancements in EdinburghRelease, couldn't we?

-- FranzJosefSilli - 01 Jul 2005

it's not just about improving performance. the other major goal is to provide an improved codebase on which to enable future improvements. that is why the vast majority of FeatureRequests were bumped to EdinburghRelease.

-- WillNorris - 02 Jul 2005

That's why I said "after Dakar" above. Some of these "nice little" features may be small, but they will have a huge impact on usability, and they may need a lot of thought and coding support. We should start combing through Codev proposals that might contribute to the usability-specific feature set.

-- PeterNixon - 01 Jul 2005

Please, don't forget that we need help now working on testing functionality and documentation in the DevelopBranch to make it possible to do the DakarRelease. Without that help, its going to take time.

-- SvenDowideit - 01 Jul 2005