[dokuwiki] Template Survey 2014

  • From: Anika Henke <anika@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: dokuwiki@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Thu, 14 Aug 2014 15:40:29 +0100

Hi all (especially template authors),

During the last few days I updated last year's template survey:
https://www.dokuwiki.org/devel:template_survey
(The main bulk of the survey itself is in a Google spreadsheet:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AvX3kzm93UhndFJmQzVSYW9ERU1FNjFYa2VrT2lGUFE&usp=sharing)

I have included a few more attributes (which filter through to the
statistics),

===== Some Results =====

Bad results:
* *The number of usable templates is still very low* (38, that is 30% vs
       27% last year)
* Most templates are still using the deprecated TPL_INC* constants (   
77%      vs      85%)
* Very few templates include the template.info.txt       (36%    vs     
23%)
* The number of templates with a broken TOC stayed exactly the same
(44), i.e. not a single old template got it fixed since the last survey
* [NEW statistic] 19 templates produce a fatal PHP error (including a
LESS errors) after installation. Those are not just old templates, some
templates get released with those errors. (This includes errors which
might not show under every circumstance, e.g. short open tags.)
* [NEW statistic] Only 17 templates (18.89%) support the sidebar config
setting

Good results:
* We have gained 16 new templates since last year
* More templates are downloadable than before (83% vs 76%)
* More templates have a repository than before (52%      vs     35%)
* [NEW statistic] Only 4 templates have a wrong base in
template.info.txt

Interesting results:
* [NEW statistic] 9 templates are using a CSS framework
  * 4x Twitter Bootstrap
  * 3x Blueprint
  * 1x Gumby
  * 1x uikit

===== Some Questions =====

While I was looking through all the templates two questions were
crossing my mind all the time:

1. When should we delete old templates? Most templates are so old, they
don't work properly anymore (or even not at all). I would suggest to
either remove their whole page, or their data entry or at least their
download link whenever they are too old. The question is: What is too
old?
There is one template which hasn't been updated since over *9 years*
(and 6 since over 8 years)! I think two years is already enough but that
might be too drastic. Maybe 5 years?
What do you think?

2. How on earth can we let users (especially newbie, non-technical
users) know when a template is crap? Lots of templates have lots of
issues and I would want to tell users "Don't use this!" but I don't
think we should just say it like that. Maybe the other way around, i.e.
to recommend good templates would be a better idea?
Just a few examples how bad and user-unfriendly a template can be: Quite
some templates have config settings but never use them. Some templates
produce fatal PHP errors (as mentioned above). Half of the templates
have a broken TOC. The majority of templates don't support RTL
languages. Lots of templates have hard-coded stuff in them. Some
templates produce JavaScript errors. Some templates do things in a
non-standard way and confuse users. And lots of other bad practices...
Any idea how to tackle this kind of problem? At least in the severe
cases (e.g. fatal errors) I think we should at least remove the download
link until it is fixed. Otherwise it would completely break a user's
wiki without a chance of recovering except with insight knowledge.
(I will start writing a few bug reports soon, at least for those severe
cases.)

Cheers,
Anika
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  • » [dokuwiki] Template Survey 2014 - Anika Henke