Fighting aversion to change

Today free time spent on http://wiki.opensuse.org trying to create support portal and learning on the run properties of current portal design. Template:Portal that is used as boilerplate for new portals, even generalized as it is, has a great potential, but to use it to its full potential, one has to forget all the tools we used before, like navigational templates based on Template:Navbar. We can use it, but every child template require manual updates, which can be laborious undertaking when number of affected pages grows. Besides its capacity to take links is very limited if we want to have it readable.

We have now CategoryTree MediaWiki extension that can list categories and as soon as someone adds new article to a category, it will be listed. It lists whole category trees in a very compact format that uses screen space efficiently. All that authors and wiki maintainers have to take care is that every article is properly categorized.

Old habits and old tools (that we know) just stand in the way to achieve more with lesser effort.

Amusing when you realize

That ... Aversion to Change applies further then GUIs, and suddenly you see your image in:

... the people who are the most stern advocates of normal users moving away from Windows, trying out alternatives, are the same people who are usually lost whenever they themselves have to change their way of doing things.

or in other words "Me and the new openSUSE wiki development".

You can see preview on temporary development copy of the wiki at http://wiki.opensuse.org . It will be switched with http://en.opensuse.org later this year, so if you link to it, please make sure that your visitors are aware that fact .