Hi again, My two cents: I’m glad to see the discussion over improved documentation, but if you give me a choice between better docs and better UI, I’ll choose a better UI every time. If contributors are going to spend real time on the concerns raised in this thread, spend the time on making the software better to the point where more docs are unnecessary. All sorts of things could improve that would make the product far more intuitive (and I know, there are probably JIRA entries on most of these already…).
- The psuedo-frames in the web UI are the source of all kinds of problems, with lots of weird horizontal scrolling I’ve noticed over the years. It makes the Logging screen in particular infuriating to use. When I click on certain log entries an arbitrary-seeming "false" flips to "true" under the "WARN" statement in the Level column. But on other log entries, it all just goes haywire all over the screen because it’s too big both horizontally and vertically, and then re-condenses as though I’d never clicked, as I mentioned before. - The top menu on the left is in plain English. The core menu on the bottom is written as though it’s being viewed by a person who only speaks UNIX. For example, there is no space between "Data" and "Import" in "DataImport" and "Segments info" could just be "Segments". Is "Plugins / Stats" two menus in one? - "Ping" in the menu takes you nowhere in particular and shouldn’t really be a menu item. It should be part of the main dashboard with all of the other tech stats (which I do like) or a menu called "Status". (Why would one core ping faster than another anyway? If this is really for "cloud" installations where cores can be split up on different servers, why am I seeing it when everything is local and immediate?) - On the Data Import page, the expandable icons are [-] when they’re expanded and still [-] when they’re collapsed. Extremely confusing. - The Data Import UI makes no mention anywhere of the ability to import from MySQL, which is 99% of what I want to do with this product. It doesn’t tell me how to set up the MySQL connector, doesn’t give me a button that turns it on in some modular fashion, doesn’t tell me if the server connection is successful, doesn’t let me easily enter or edit credentials, doesn’t let me edit my queries anywhere, and doesn’t let me test out a new query and see how it might fit into the Solr schema. These deficiencies are presumably also true for any database data source, e.g. Postgres/DB2/ODBC/whatever—which also are not listed, were I curious to know what Solr can do just by looking at the product itself. - Nor does the Data Import UI have another section for picking a folder on the filesystem that might contain PDFs I want to import with Tika. - There is no field picker on the Query screen, but I just spent all of that time defining my fields in those XML files I can’t edit or auto-generate through the UI. That means I have to do extra work to remember them all. But then there is a field picker on the Analysis screen? - How do I restart Solr from the UI? Or change memory allocation settings? Can I? - How do I change the port the UI is running on from the UI? Or limit the IP addresses Jetty is binding to? Can I? - How do I change log settings through the UI? Can I? - For those places where technical terms really are necessary (and I’d argue that should be nowhere), tooltips should be pervasive to explain what everything means. q? fq? fl? df? - The Data Import UI currently broadcasts your MySQL database password to the world for whoever is logged in. In a best-case scenario, the legitimate user might have search admin permissions but ideally not full MySQL permissions. In a worst-case scenario, they’re a random stranger who used nmap to find an open port 8983 and just got closer to rooting your server or at least taking all of your data. This feature—showing the password—seems unnecessary. Though I take issue with the kludge of shoving a configuration file in an IFRAME or something like it in the first place, while it’s still part of the product, at least replace whatever comes after the string "password=" and before the next space with some asterisks. - The Data Import UI always checks the "clean" box by default, which means every time I try to do something I almost erase my entire core, which takes a full day and a lot of CPU cycles to rebuild. I know this has been in JIRA for some time, and it’s still not fixed. And it’s a bug that destroys data! - Revealing my true ignorance here, I have no idea how to use the Analysis screen. - The Files screen doesn’t say the name of the parent folder at the top, so it’s not entirely obvious where I even am on my filesystem or why I want the ability to view, but not edit, files through the browser. My general feeling is that the UI does mostly things I don’t understand or want, and not the few basic things that I do want. Even with a great sample environment, this would still be true. This is why the documentation ends up being so important. Again, I would point everyone to successful server products that are already out there that have done similar tasks well for decades now. If you don’t like WordPress, or the now aged Netscape Enterprise Server, then there’s phpMyAdmin, Oracle Application Server, Microsoft IIS, etc. They all have web UIs that are for the most part self-explanatory. Good software doesn’t force users to learn how it works. It hides the inner workings under the interface, so that people never even have to worry about it at all. Aaron PlainSite | http://www.plainsite.org
