In praise of MediaWiki and Bugzilla

Actually, this isn't quite what the title says, I've not suddenly gone crazy and used this forum for praise rather than my normal moans, but using some software recently has actually made me feel a lot better about both MediaWiki and Bugzilla, normally I've found them difficult to use, but with recent experience of a commercial version of these 2, I'd now positively love to use them.

Confluence and Jira

Confluence is a commercial wiki, Jira a commercial bug tracker, both are from atlassian, they say about their software:
Our software is better because:
  • we value brilliant simplicity as a point of differentiation
  • we think through the customer's problems thoroughly, and come up with innovative solutions to their problems
from: http://www.atlassian.com/about/mission.jsp I can't really agree with those statements, I've had lots of problems with both products, they seem technically okay, there's not really been many technical problems - non fatal script errors mostly, But the user interfaces are just so odd as to drive you crazy, you just can't get anything done, one of the big problems is the obsessive use of POST everywhere, so things like a the results of a search doesn't appear in the history, the user interface is completely inconsistent, there are two EDIT / EDIT links 20pixels apart, one edits the page, another edits tags on the page, it's not at all clear which is which. After annoying the poor guy who was looking after the installs I was using, raising bugs, moaning and being generally the annoying person I can be, I went to the atlassian people, which just turned up more problems, they have a link to popular issues which doesn't list any popular issues for example (there is a list of popular issues, you can find it if you look hard enough.) Most annoying though was trying to create an account on the official site, it complains if your username has a uppercase letter in it. I can't understand this, it takes more effort to come up with a usable error message - not that they particularly have, than it does to simply lowercase the field - although quite why you have the restriction at all is another question. I'm not sure how requiring a particular format of username is "brilliant simplicity as a point of differentiation"

This entry was posted on Thu Jun 29 23:56:20 UTC+0100 2006 and is filed under General.

Comments

  1. miles gray Says:
    Mon Dec 4 05:30:57 UTC 2006 Hello, I guess this is probably a dated blog post so maybe nobody will see this (a statement that becomes self-contradicting as soon as it is read, but not at the time I write this).. aaanyway just felt I had to point out that you are not the only one that finds Confluence UI to be "so odd as to drive you crazy", just the other day I was reading from a fellow traveller that the confluence UI "sucks big time" and here are the reasons he gives.. http://shelter.nu/blog/2006/12/confluence-user-interface.html
  2. Semantic Web Blog Says:
    Mon Aug 20 17:55:17 UTC+0100 2007 [...] In praise of MediaWiki and Bugzilla Actually, this isn’t quite what the title says, I’ve not suddenly gone crazy and used this forum for praise rather than my normal moans, but using some software recently has actually made me feel a lot better about both MediaWiki and Bugzilla, normally I’ve found them difficult to use, but … [...]
  3. emag Says:
    Wed Apr 23 15:47:44 UTC+0100 2008 I definitely have to agree here. We (I) *just* set up a Confluence wiki at work in the past week or two. Having used probably a dozen different wikis in the past, I have to say that even in the latest release (2.8.0), the UI is one of the worst, most confusing ones I've ever had the misfortune to come across. I've had nothing but technical people trying to use it so far, and have gotten sick of fielding the calls already. I *might* have been able to overlook that, if it weren't for the fact that I've had to kill the process and restart it every few days, as it seems to go Out Of Memory on a fairly regular basis with almost zero actual usage (since we've yet to really tell any users about it). I'm currently allocating over a gig to just this instance, and it made it maybe 5 days before going OOM. If anything, this is just reinforcing my admitted biases against Java server apps, "Enterprise" software, and the resultant kwality [sic] of the intersection of the two. What I really can't understand is that in the past month or so, several real people on local LUG and SAGE mailing lists have been praising Confluence for how wonderful it is compared to alternatives like MediaWiki and TWiki. I don't get it...usability-wise for both admins and users, it's horrid.