WNG-2: Add Page button¶
Summary: Make it easy to add a new page.
Users don’t want Wikis, they want Pages. More specifically, novice users don’t get the idea of highlighting a phrase in order to create a document.
In this small step, we fix this primary problem. Users can add a page directly, but without sacrificing completely the interlinking of wiki. Finally, we pave the way to later changing the word on the tool tab from “WIKI” to “Pages”, if we decide it is warranted.
UX Needs¶
For the most part, this is a very simple change in the user experience, immediately obvious and welcome. We put another action button in the toolbar.
At the same time, we have a subtle issue to introduce into the UI: “Parent”. (See next section for background.) When adding/viewing/editing a page, we might need to display some UX control explaining this. We might also need a way to edit a page and re-parent it.
Background on “Parent” vis a vis folders¶
What makes a Wiki different than just Pages in a Folder? Connections. That is, Wiki forces you to choose a place (i.e. highlight some text) and initiate the new page from that place. Then, when creating the new page, it remembers that starting point and considers the page of the starting point the “parent”.
This helps wikis be self-organizing. You can auto-generate a table of contents just by listing the parent/grandparent/etc. relationships. In a way, you can think of this just like folders, subfolders, and sub-sub-folders.
If this sounds a little like Reference Manuals and sections, that is also a hierarchy. In fact, a hierarchy that you can also put in certain orders. We’ll revisit that in later proposals.
Alas, current KARL makes you pay the price of parenting (you have to choose some text before adding a page) without giving the payback (autogenerated table of contents.)
Proposal¶
Make a new action button called “Add Page”:
Note
We are not removing the existing facility where, inside the editor, you can highlight some text and make it a wikilink (or use the double parens manually.))
When you click “Add Page”, the page you are on becomes the “Parent” for the new Page. By default, this fact is invisible during adding and editing. If you want to alter the parent information, you do so via a toolbar option:
This menu option will allow editing the parent page, most likely with an autocomplete widget of some type to choose the new parent. The editing can be done either with a new edit screen or a popup window for inplace editing.
Now that we have parents, we need to change the navigation in the toolbar to allow getting back to your “parent” (aka folder):
Rather than have two links there, the better solution is to get rid of the “Back to Front Page” which is part of the current requirements. The “WIKI” tab, sitting just 50 pixels away, does the same thing. But this mockup presumes it remains a requirement to have another way to get to the top.
Note
Currently, adding a wiki page does not give the option for editing the title. It comes from the text you were linking. When clicking “add page”, though, the Add Wiki Page screen will need to allow providing a title.
Under the hoods, this means we will need a completely different approach to managing links between pages. A big architectural change.