One place to overview your stuff - new dashboard, new homepage

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One place to overview your stuff - new dashboard, new homepage

michal frackowiak 17 Apr 2009 10:27

For the last 2 weeks we have been excited to work on a prototype of a new, quite radical improvement to Wikidot: new homepage. This perfectly fits into the trend of making Wikidot more accessible, easier and more intuitive, that in the end also increase usability and overal user experience.

Currently a logged-in user is presented either with our default homepage which contains some general information about Wikidot + featured content, or the current my account page, which has limited customization options and, honestly, could be improved in a number of ways.

The new homepage will eventually replace the current "my account" and will bring much better overview on your sites, your activity, suggested content. It will be much easier to watch content, get new blog posts (through the RSS reader widget) and generally have much better overview on things going on at Wikidot. To make the long story short, we want the new home page THE place you start your day. Gradually we would also like to add more importance to connecting people (aka friends or connections), easier messaging, inviting, and discovering new content on Wikidot.

The screenshot above shows an example dashboard panel with widgets showing inbox messages (including invitations), Wikidot news and changelog, a mini-wiki widget, summary of AdSense earnings and a couple of external widgets from iGoogle, Widgetbox and UStream (I know the kitty is the sweetest one ;-) ). A user is able to add/remove/rearrange content freely, in a similar way you can do it on iGoogle or Netvibes. To make the new homepage and dashboard fully functional and ready we still need some work, but I guess in the end we will enjoy this new feature.

The original idea of Wikidot (from ~2 years ago) was to create a network of socially connected wikis (and people). So far we have been successfully building one of the most technically advanced wiki platform, but honestly we still lack social features that would allow higher adoption of Wikidot and more rapid growth. I guess, since Wikidot already has a very firm position in the "world of wikis", it is time to calmly look at changes that will leverage Wikidot to even higher position. The changes we will be concentrating on will mostly follow those guidelines.

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Michał Frąckowiak @ Wikidot Inc.
Visit my blog at michalf.me

Re: One place to overview your stuff - new dashboard, new homepage

mattdm 17 Apr 2009 10:44

I dunno. The whole "home page for everyone / portal site for the internet" thing was very hot in the late 1990s. As a paying customer, I'd rather see development on some of the not-so-polished areas on the technical side.

Re: One place to overview your stuff - new dashboard, new homepage

WMGarrison 17 Apr 2009 12:43

What I like about Wikidot is that it's fast and easy to make websites. I'm not sure I care about funny cats on the home page… If I wanted widgets, I'd use iGoogle not Wikidot.

Yes, a new control panel that shows all my sites would be useful. For each site:

- hits in last 24 hours, 7 days, 1 month, 12 months
- number of users, mods, admins and change over last week
- number of pages, edits, comments and change over last week
- size of attachments
- etc.

Last edited on 17 Apr 2009 14:52 by WMGarrison + Show more

Re: One place to overview your stuff - new dashboard, new homepage

promod 17 Apr 2009 14:59

Hi Michal. A new homepage would not be high on my list of priorities but I'm glad to see ongoing development. WMGarrison makes good points for areas of further development. I'm not a programmer or designer. I read the instructions but still find seemingly simple things difficult to do, such as

• editing a theme (I'd prefer to have more themes to select from)
• embedding widgets (e.g., a Twitter feed)
• attaching a hyperlink to a photo (e.g., to a LinkedIn profile)

I know I'm off topic and could get help by asking. Thanks for sharing the latest developments to make Wikidot easier and more intuitive to use.

Re: One place to overview your stuff - new dashboard, new homepage

michal frackowiak 17 Apr 2009 15:02

@WMGarrison
One thing I can say right now is that the sets of widgets on the screenshot is just an example, in fact it is more a demonstration of the widget/portlet framework.

E.g. there is an RSS reader that you can point to any source, and we hope through that more people would use tons of usefull RSS feeds generated here and there at Wikidot.

There is also a "custom" widget that can accept all embeds code that the [[embed]] tag accepts, so this is how you get a Google Calendar of "The Kitty".

Some of the crucial and core widgets are still under design. And widgets… - I do not like the name too (Portlets is a more appropriate name), but it is really a good way to organize your "central Wikidot management" / "Wikidot information center" or just "My Account", whatever you call it. And the panels you are mentioning is something we had in mind too.

In fact the customizable homepage is targeted to both "newbie" users, but most importantly also to hard-core multi-wiki admins so that they can have an instant overview of their estates. The need to visit multiple sites is what many user need to do right now and we have many opinions this is at least sub-optimal. Email notifications (aka watching) solves this problem, but on a different (but also important) level.

We would be glad to hear your opinions about it.

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Michał Frąckowiak @ Wikidot Inc.
Visit my blog at michalf.me

Last edited on 17 Apr 2009 15:24 by michal frackowiak + Show more

Re: One place to overview your stuff - new dashboard, new homepage

pieterh 19 Apr 2009 09:07

Speaking as long time Wikidot user, I like to ask, "exactly what problems are you solving, and for who?" and secondly, "are you sure this is the simplest, most obvious solution?" Doing stuff because it feels like a good idea is usually asking for trouble.

Let's take the problem that pro users have, of managing lots of sites. What's the simplest way to make this? We already have a framework for embedded apps, it's called "module". No need to invent something new. Second, we want a personalized home page? Someone once suggested every user have an automatic private site. Many Wikidot users I know end up making this for ideas, todos, and site management. If my private site was easy to jump to (one keystroke?) and I could customize it, with modules like [[module SiteStats]] then you have a simpler and more useful solution to this.

What this gives you is (a) a simple evolution and (b) a fully flexible result. Once I have a personal site with what you call "real estate" management I can add issue tracking, new pages, categories, etc. Very useful.

It's good to experiment with new functionality but it's wise to exploit what we have first, where possible.

You also say this is for new users. I'm not sure what that means: could you explain exactly what problem new users have, and how this solves it? For me, new users are more troubled by the lack of templates for sites and pages (the "blank sheet" syndrome).

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Portfolio

Last edited on 19 Apr 2009 09:15 by pieterh + Show more

Re: One place to overview your stuff - new dashboard, new homepage

michal frackowiak 20 Apr 2009 13:50

I think we are talking about 2 different issues. We already know that "power users" can use Wikidot features in a way that is far beyond limits of any other wiki system - combining the power of modules, templates, ListPages etc. I know you can create a page that combines several modules with any layout you wish, but this requires at least some advanced knowledge you do not have within your first 5 minutes of using Wikidot. Also, even if we provide a page with such a collection of "management modules", it is not THAT easy to change, remove, move them around. So this is not really equivalent.

Look at the petition module. To manage this, you need to manually embed the [[module PetitionAdmin]] somewhere, to even control the petitions. This works if you know what you are doing, but IMHO is not necessary. I guess we should seriously start looking at things that stops people from using Wikidot, and add things that make their work easier, like hiding complexity and internal structures with nice and elegant interfaces. We, developers, often think in terms of data, structures and programming. And we are often very good at it. We can solve very complex problems, optimize them, create advanced algorithms and workflows. But vast majority of our users are not, they do not care, they want solutions that "Just Work". When we introduce the power of Wikidot, we need to do this in an encouraging way. I know we want the same (i.e. better Wikidot).

Anyway, we are seeing more and more services that let you create your homepage based on the dashboard concept. The last such example we have seen are dashboards on Wordpress.com. And it does work. I still think it is the most elegant and flexible way to build your customized homepage. Simply choose which elements you want to have and you can move them around just by dragging. The concept is simple, does not require any explanation etc.

BTW: Dashboards IS based on modules. We just simplified adding them and managing, so that you do not need to type @@[[module ActivityAcrossMySites limit="5" …. ]]@, but just click on a button. If making more user-friendly interfaces that let you manage data easier is our goal, why would this be broken?

On the other hand the "blank sheet" effect is one of the most important issues we need to face, agree. But this is a separate issue.

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Michał Frąckowiak @ Wikidot Inc.
Visit my blog at michalf.me

Re: One place to overview your stuff - new dashboard, new homepage

James Kanjo 23 Apr 2009 04:28

Hmm, after much thinking about whether this idea is worth the effort or not, I've come to agree with you Michal.
I have to say, Michal hit the nail on the head when he said "The need to visit multiple sites is what many user need to do right now and we have many opinions this is at least sub-optimal."

This would help a lot.

@ pieterh, iGoogle has helped me lately, but I don't like the way its structure is so rigid and limited. A dashboard powered by Wikidot would be much more beneficial for me.

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λ James Kanjo
_{Blog | Wikidot Expert | λ and Proud
Web Developer | HTML | CSS | JavaScript}

Re: One place to overview your stuff - new dashboard, new homepage

vela 29 Apr 2009 02:30

I like the idea of a new homepage because I want the "internal mail" feature to be easily accessible from the homepage, with a display of how many mails are waiting to be read.

Re: One place to overview your stuff - new dashboard, new homepage

greenwriting 05 May 2009 11:22

Interesting stuff. But I am really a non-techie wikidot user. I love wikidot, but I agree with the comment about the white page syndrome:

"You also say this is for new users. I'm not sure what that means: could you explain exactly what problem new users have, and how this solves it? For me, new users are more troubled by the lack of templates for sites and pages (the "blank sheet" syndrome)."

What I would like to see is more templates and more "simple", non-techie, helps…. For example, in order to create a table, I copied the example from the documentation site, but then when I tried to change the colour I lost it. So I deleted it, and just copied the one and deleted the sample information. I need really basic information on using wiki. I have looked at a lot of great wiki sites, but I just can't follow the codes.

As well, I am now trying to teach a fellow staff member how to use wiki. I feel like "dud", but really am far advanced to those here for whom the internet is quite new!

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