Document Lifecycle

XWiki offers to perform several actions on a document (a.k.a a page).

Create

There are three ways to create new pages.

By adding a wanted link

You can edit an existing page and create a link to your new page (either in Wiki mode or in WYSIWYG mode). The resulting link will show up with a question mark next to it, showing it as a nonexistent page. Simply click on the link to create the page.

This will take you to a page with a message to create the missing page (as presented above).This is the recommended approach as it'll allow you to create a navigation while you create new pages.

By using the Add page menu action

Starting with the Colibri skin you can create a new page straight from the menu at the top of the page.

Starting with XWiki Enterprise 2.6 there's an Add menu:

Choose the page name and the space you want to create it into and click the "Create" button:

For versions prior to XWiki Enterprise 2.6, there was no Add menu but instead the Add action was in the menu for the space:

If you hover over the "Main" menu and click on "Create Page" the following will appear:

Make sure you type the Space name in the first field, then add the Page name in the second field. Click the "Create" button and you will be able to edit your newly created page right away.

By entering directly the URL of the new page

You can also enter the new page name directly in the URL of your browser. For example http://locahost:8080/xwiki/bin/view/SpaceName/PageName. If the space (SpaceName here) or page (PageName here) don't exist then you'll get an empty page with a message saying that the page doesn't exist and there'll be a link to create it:

Create from Template

Starting with XWiki Enterprise 2.4 users and applications can provide documents that can be used as template when creating new pages. The new document content (content, objects and other metadata) will be replicated from the template.

• After you have created the template and the template provider you can go then start creating pages from this template:

  

• This example shows that "Wanted Links" also offers the choice to create the new document from the available template ("My Template" template in the image below):

  

Edit

This allows the editing of a page. See the page editing tutorial for more details.

Show

Whenever you click on a link to a page XWiki automatically shows the page in view mode. This is the default mode. XWiki also supports displaying the page in other formats that may be more adapted to specific circumstances:

• Code
• XML
• Comments
• Attachments
• History

Code

You can view the content of a page without having to edit it (and thus you don't need edit rights). This option is shown only for users in Advanced Mode. 

To see the code when using the Colibri skin, you have to go to the More Actions menu, and click on the View Source.

When using the Toucan skin, you do this by moving the mouse over the View Source button under View menu.

XML

XWiki allows exposing a page in XML. This is not ordinarily useful, but it can prove useful for example if you want to write a tool that automatically parses the content of a page. As the XML format is well-defined for all pages, this is much easier than doing screen-scrapping for example. In addition this XML format is used internally by XWiki for performing imports/exports of pages and whole wikis.

Comments

Users with the comment right can leave comments on pages. This allows them to provide feedback without requiring edit rights. 

Starting with XWiki 2.6 you can add a comment using the add menu:

On Colibri skin

On Toucan skin

Attachments

A page can contain attachments. See Attachments for more details.

History

Displays the version history of the page. See Version Control for more details.

Print

There are several possible printing options (what you see may vary depending on the Skin used).

When using the Colibri Skin, you will find the Print Preview button on the top menu by hovering over More Actions:

• Print Preview: Generates a page which is formatted so that it can be easily printed using your browser's Print feature.

  

Under the Toucan skin the following options are found in the Print menu at the top:

• Print: Calls you're browser's Print feature to print the current page
• Print Preview: Generates a page which is formatted so that it can be easily printed using your browser's Print feature.

  

Export

There are several possible exporting formats that XWiki supports : PDF, RTF, XAR, HTML exports: See the Export feature for more information.

On Colibri skin:

On Toucan skin:

Delete

Removes a page. A confirmation is asked before the removal is done.
To restore a deleted document, go to Quick Links panel on the right side and click Document Index. Click on the Deleted Documents tab then click restore to the corresponding document you want to restore.

On the Colibri skin:

On the Toucan skin:

Copy

It is possible to create a copy of an existing page. To do so, you need to do a search with Admin Rights using the title of the page you want to copy. You will then see a "copy" next to the page you want to copy. 

After clicking on it you will be prompted to enter the location of the page you want to copy (that is, "where should the page be copied?"). Click on "copy" and you're done!

On the Colibri skin

Choose the language and the target page then click the "Copy" button:

On the Toucan skin

Move/Rename

A rename feature is available in XWiki. Its effect is to change the page name (that is, you get http://<server>/xwiki/bin/View/NewSpace/NewPageName instead of http://<server>/xwiki/bin/View/OldSpace/OldPageName) and all the backlinks linking to it. This means that you can easily move a page from one space to another, as well as keep them evolving with your wiki.

The rename will perform 2 refactorings:

• update backlinks
• update parent information

In colibri, you can access the rename feature for a page by clicking on Rename under the More Actions in the top menu bar:

When using the Toucan skin, the Rename function can be found under the Action menu in the top menu bar:

Once this is done, you will be prompted to input the new Space and Page name you want your document to take:

Now you can link to the page using its new name.

Limitations

There are still some limitations on renaming:

• backlinks have to be turned on (they are turned on by default but if you have turned them off, rename will not rename backlinks and you'll have to turn them on again to benefit from this feature)
• backlinks in objects attached to pages are not currently renamed. You can track issue XWIKI-981 to follow the progress.
• backlinks are saved when a page is saved thus it may happen with a clean XWiki database that backlinks are not saved. In this special case, you can call the following in a page to refresh all links (you'll need to be admin to do this):
  $xwiki.refreshLinks()

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