Modern theme has a confusing pseudo tab control behaviour

Observation

Apparently, Moin tries to emulate some tab control behaviour that allows to switch between different pages like it is well known from Wikipedia. However Moin offers not real tab control behaviour but only some pseudo tab control behaviour, which on the first look looks like tab controls, but on a second look, they are'nt. Why? When you e.g. start in this wiki on MoinMoinWiki (provided that you use moderne theme), Moin shows three tab controls: RecentChanges, FindPage, HelpContent and MoinMoinWiki. Now when you click e.g. on HelpContent since you as beginner want to look up something e.g. about navigation, Moin loses the tab MoinMoinWiki. This is unexpected behaviour for the user! I have never seen some software, when you click on one tab another tab is lost at the same time. That's why I call the Moin behaviour pseudo tab control behaviour. It's not real tab control behaviour which allows to switch between the tabs as you want wihtout losing any of the tabs.

Another problem closly realted to this is the possibility to set/delete quicklinks form the main menue im moderne theme. Inexperienced users click von "Add link", get a message "Page to quicklinks added" but are than puzzeld about how to use the quicklinks for navigation. Nothing seems to happen: no drop-down list box "quicklinks" is added or activated, no new tab controll "quicklink" appears. Only when the users surfs away from the page and says to himself "I don't know what quicklinks are and how to use them" he could see, that adding a quicklink to a page adds a new tab. That's not very intuitiv. When adding a removing a quicklinks, it would be better to have some direct effect on the screen - besides the message.

Task

Users

Context

Discussion

Moin adds a tab for the current page you have navigated to (no matter how you did that) - this is the blue tab you are seeing. Of course this tab vanishes (or rather is replaced by the new page) if some other page becomes the current page.

That blue tab is given to you to make it easier to get back to the normal page display of the current page - e.g. when you called the info action.

• What it is is one of the things you can do/see with regard to the current page: view, edit, info, attachments; and as such should be grouped with them, rather than with the global recent/find/help items. Of course, all the page action navigation group items (as with all internal non-content navigation groups) should avoid disappearing on use where possible. --tuukka 2007-08-25

We didn't include a link to page_front_page on this wiki (because the logo and the interwiki name already link there), but you can easily do that in your configuration, see navi_bar.

Modern tabs are not like MediaWiki tabs - they show the main pages in the wiki, and not the different views of the current page (edit, talk). The problem with disappearing tab is cause by trying to show the current page in the tabs, which obviously disappear when you navigate to another page. The problem with quicklinks is caused again by the current page already in the tabs when you click "Add Link". Both issue can be solved by not adding the current page to the end of the tabs.

If you are in Attachments dialog the current page tab is used to go back to this page.

• Of course it could have an other place.

CategoryUsabilityObservation