The instructions showed to the user when registering on the XMPP transport currently suck.
“Please enter your XMPP JID and password as it’s used on the XMPP server pointed to by the transport.”
Issues:
“JID” should be replaced by something more human.
The instructions are written to be read by the administrator of the transport. However, it are end users who will have to read this text and they will not know to which XMPP server the transport points!!
The word “Please” is unecessary and may make the dialog larger in some clients. This is especially important on devices with a small screen (e.g. cell phone).
“It’s” is informal, isn’t it? :o)
Suggestions:
At least the full version (“Jabber ID”) is more descriptive, but I prefer “Contact ID” (this will also be good for consistency with the rest of Coccinella’s UI).
Allow people to enter any JID (not only 1 preconfigured server). If this is not possible to do very soon, at least tell the user which server the administrator configured!
I think saying that the current instructions “suck” is a little harsh, but you do have some good suggestions. I would suggest replacing JID with Jabber ID or even Username, rather than Contact ID. To me, Contact ID is the ID of someone on your roster/buddy list, not your own ID.
As for allowing people to connect to any XMPP server, that will be possible in the next release of the plugin.
Oh yes, thank you Ryan, I completely forgot about that. As of 1.2.3 and Ryan’s patch, admins will be able to set the connect server to * to indicate users can connect to whatever server resolves as per the JID they entered.
For what it’s worth, I don’t like the term Jabber ID anymore since there’s the movement away from the term Jabber to XMPP. However, JID seems to be sticking and not changing to, say, XID, so … it’s kind of a confusing mess right now, ain’t it?
In Coccinella we also switched away from Jabber, JID, Jabber ID, and so forth, though this switch is still not 100% complete. For instance, in the Add Contact dialog the former “Jabber ID” field is now “Contact ID”. When you select MSN, “MSN address” will appear in the field (selected). For ICQ this is “ICQ Number”, for AIM this is “AIM screenname”, and so forth. For Jabber this still is “Jabber ID”…
This is still on the TODO list: rename “Jabber” and “Jabber ID” to “Normal” or “Default”. This will highlight that all other protocols are alien and no main part of Coccinella. If people want the best, they should the normal/default chat system (XMPP) and they should not need to know its name