[Development] Call for Volunteers: SSO-improvements for qt-project.org

[Jeff Mitchell]

On 12/7/2011 9:26 AM, Stephen Kelly wrote:
> The worst thing about Confluence is that it can only be edited in rich
> text mode. There is no markup behind that which you can switch to in
> order to edit pages.

Yes, this is new in Confluence 4.0 (which admittedly I have not used yet).

The reason for this is that instead of storing all data as wiki markup
and then rendering the page, all page editing, storing, and viewing is
done in XHTML.

The upside is that this removes lots of potential confusion, bugs, and
so on related to wiki markup -> page rendering. It also means that in
terms of exporting to another platform, it's actually pretty nice, since
AFAIK you can pop that into an XSLT and convert to whatever you want.
That can be quite a lot nicer than trying to convert between wiki markup
syntaxes.

Also, it means that the rich text editor renders the same as what you
see on the page, as opposed to the Confluence 3 rich text editor.

> It is highly frustrating for me, and I'd expect for other people who are
> used to dealing with code.

At work we used to have a whole ton of different MediaWiki installs.
Most groups running such an install complained that nobody actually used
them, and an internal research project by one group showed that the
number one reason people didn't use the wiki was because they didn't
want to have to learn the syntax. When I set up Confluence here, within
a year and a half we were up to >1100 users and >110 spaces, because
people liked the rich text editor.

I'm with you in that it can be nice to format things in a textual way,
but I do think for the average user out there, not having to learn or
think about wiki syntax can be a powerful motivator for actually
contributing to a wiki.

> Maybe not a showstopper, but something to consider and try out. For me,
> one wiki is not very different to another, but the one with markup as
> its primary source is the winner. That of course doesn't solve the
> authentication issue.

I've think I've said all my arguments for Confluence between this email
and my previous email; my goal isn't to shill for Atlassian. I just
happen to think that it's a good product that a lot of people find easy
to use and that has a lot of functionality and would integrate well into
the existing system. If, as I was told, MediaWiki was set up purely in
haste rather than due to its merits, it's worth evaluating the
alternatives before proceeding too far down its path. If the
alternatives have been fully vetted already and everyone is happy with
MediaWiki, then cool.

--Jeff