Ways to make TWiki more user-friendly

It's well known that TWiki is hard to use in many ways, both for users and admins. Since users and admins by and large have different problems with it, each warrants a different topic.

Some things that make TWiki hard for users:

• Documentation that's written for more than one audience. For example, TWikiAccessControl is incredible overkill for ordinary users, who may want to know how to set the access control for a given topic.
• Odd WikiWord conventions. There is no good reason for digits only being allowed to appear in the last "word" of TWiki's wikiwords. It's completely unobvious (and unreasonable) that Md5sumsAfterBurning or Summer2006ForSeniors are not considered wikiwords. Despite what WikiWord says, Md5sumsAfterBurning is not a bad example of a wikiword; it's merely an implementation decision from who knows when.
• Complex "recipes" to do what should be simple things. For example, %CHILDTOPICS% is friendly; the equivalent SEARCH pattern (which I'm not going to take the time to try and concoct) isn't.

-- Contributors: MeredithLesly

Discussion

I'm assuming here, of course, that people are doing more than paying lip service to making TWiki more user-friendly. Also note that this topic is in large part based on users experience and not just my opinion.

I hope others will contribute to the above list and, if possible, come up with solutions.

-- MeredithLesly - 29 Jun 2006

Crawford has written WebPermissionsPlugin, which is a good step in the direction of hiding complexity. But it needs to be updated to run on latest TWiki, looking at WebPermissionsPluginDev.

-- ArthurClemens - 29 Jun 2006

The experiences of my users first time they get in touch with TWiki are: "Wow, this is soooo nice and easy!" ...

-- MichaelDaum - 30 Jun 2006

Are your users doing more than just quick editing of a topic? That part is easy. Much of the rest isn't.

-- MeredithLesly - 30 Jun 2006