The Big Picture: User's View of TWiki

Overview: This critical summary of Codev topics intends to organize the various user-oriented discussions going on, from both admin and end-user POVs. Complements The Big Picture: Under the Hood, dealing with TWiki code quality.

Navigation

Quick note: there are always at least 2-3 fairly involved ideas for somehow dramatically improving the navigation and organization of a TWiki site. Summarize here...

• navigation between webs is fine
• navigation between topics could use some improvement
  • c2's reverse index is good
  • index generation is SLOW
  • hierarchical nav is untested; supposedly slow/heavy on resources

Usability

How easy is it to work with TWiki? At first glance, most of the discussion in this area shifts either to specific bugs or feature enhancement ideas, or to Navigation schemes.

Practically, speaking, two areas:

1. Manual - entering freeform data according to CollaborationGuidelines
2. Automated - classifying, navigating, finding, sorting, maintaining

Packaging: Look&Feel, Branding, etc

The lack of a reasonable slick interface comes up often, but there don't seem to be (m)any time unchallenged graphic artists willing to step up... This is actually a problem that includes Web standards: is TWiki really XHTML 1.0 more or less - not just yet. Relatively little discussion of a significant issue.

-- MikeMannix - 28 Sep 2001

In an answer to Packaging and Usability, MegaTWiki is a little closer to a generically, nicely packaged product, with site administration tools (automated), and a slightly slicker themable interface (influenced a bit by TigerSkin). Hierarchical nav supported here is fast, because it supports HierarchicallyNestedTwikiWebs, and addition/removal of key topics from the nav (it's not search based). MegaTWiki has tested well with the ASIC engineering group at Sun Microsystems. Feel free to kick the tires a bit.

-- PeterNixon - 25 Jun 2002