XWiki Features Survey 6X Report

03 Jun 2014 5 min read

At the end of last year, we launched a survey to find out what were the most anticipated features for the XWiki Enterprise 6.X cycle. 

With the 5.X cycle coming to an end, we wanted to get some clues as to what changes our users and contributors were interested in. 

This article presents the results of the survey and summarizes the roadmap for the 6.x cycle that followed it.

Features ranking

Several features were listed and grouped by theme before being presented to respondents (XWiki SAS customers and members of the XWiki community). 

The graph below shows the ranking of the most anticipated features:

Classement Final.png

Improved loading time for XWiki's pages and an improved WYSIWYG editor were among the most voted features.
However the integration with third-party proprietary applications, the offline mode and improvements of XEclipse were voted as less necessary by our users.

Topic rankings

Themes Rating Final.png

Ease of use and good quality were the two topics standing out in this ranking.
The flavors and extensions/applications were also very voted.
We noticed there were higher expectations from our customers in terms of universal access and mobility and less from the XWiki community members.
In contrast, social features were not considered an important topic for this project cycle.

The XWiki Enterprise 6.X roadmap

Taking this survey into account, the XWiki community has decided the following theme for the 6.x cycle: Slick, Slim and Secure

The following items were listed in the roadmap:

 * Performance improvements across the board: page load time, scalability, activity stream rewrite, memory usage rationalization.
 * Introducing the flavor mechanism (as already discussed here) with the idea of removing the maximum number of extensions from the base and being able to build a minimal, lightweight wiki, but also to have a few flavors.
 * Slickness achieved with the new skin, syntax highlighting + autocompletion, easier rights UI and more.
 * Spending time improving various security aspects, including the addition of Signed scripts.

 In short we’ve realized that XWiki has grown along the years and it’s becoming a bit heavyweight in various aspects. So the idea would be to focus on performance and ease of use in order to slim it down and ensure it’s kicking fast!

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