I had
problems renaming a namespace and Michitux was kind enough to help. I think, my problems where caused by my misinterpretation of the current user interface. I'll try to explain and make a suggestion for changes to the user interface.
I guess, these are the things that were not obvious to me from the user interface:
* Which page/namespace am I moving/renaming?
* What is the effect of the operation I specified?
This might have been at least partially caused by two things:
* All field descriptors have 'new' in them, but the value my not be new
* When moving a namespace, both field values will be combined
Plus, I'm a little stupid :)
What might an inteface look like that would have helped me? Here is an ASCII drawing of my first stab:
-- Page--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| |
| Move <full path of current page > |
| |
| [ v ] : [ ] : [ ] |
| to <full path of moved page > |
| |
| [ MOVE ] |
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-- Namespace --------------------------------------------------------------------------
| |
| Move <full path of current namespace > |
| |
| [ v ] : [ ] |
| to <full path of moved namespace > |
| |
| [ MOVE ] |
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[ v]: pull down field, [ ]: text input field, <...>: text provided by the application
The main idea is to provide immediate feedback what operation will be performed: 'Move' holds the current page/namespace name, 'to' holds the new page/namespace name which is modified by the interactive fields above. The format of page names and namespace names is the one the administrator is used to, the interactive fields mimic that syntax.
The pull down fields would be initialized to the current namespace, the following input field would be initially left empty (here the user could specify new namespace components), and the third input field (for the page name) would be initialized to the current page name.
I guess renaming/moving is one of those operations in a wiki you don't want to make a mistake with. Too much could go wrong. Nobody wants to loose a page, let alone an entire namespace, somewhere in wiki nirwana :). So I think it would be nice to have a user interface as intuitive and reinforcing to the user as possible.