Wikis & Blogs - More Web 2.0 than Forums?

Quote from: OpenGeek at Jan 29, 2006, 08:52 PM

I truly think in the time it would take someone to setup and maintain a MediaWiki installation, participate in this separate content community, and then move appropriate documentation back to the main documentation system -- despite being a drain of important resources to the project and a distraction for the real potential of MODx to be used to blur the lines of wikis, blogs, and content management systems -- we could easily implement ways to make our documentation system easier to participate in.

I must say, I never looked at it from a management point of view. Jason, you could be absolutely right here. I think maybe a commenting system similar to PHP.net is the way to go. I just feel that some of the entries are a little underdocumented.

I would personally feel like a pest if I was to constantly bug people and ask really silly questions because I didn’t entirely understand something. As useful as forums are, I personally find it slow to drudge through the search facility to find my answer. (I’m always paranoid to post questions, because 9 times out of 10, it’s already been asked!)

I absolutely love MODx, and I think it’s great as it is now, and there’s so much more to look forward to. From a management point of view alone, I think a Wiki is a bad idea after reading Jason’s post. (Changed my tune here, huh?) If it distracts from the development of MODx is anyway, I think we should sit on it. I would however like to push for optional commenting on the Documentation. That would be highly beneficial IMO.

And of course:

Quote from: Bravado at Jan 29, 2006, 02:15 PM

I’ve been looking a little bit on ways to output the content of pages to PDF. This might help alot with the official documentation.

That sounds super sweet!!!

I’m agree to the commenting system 100%. I’m not gonna participate in this wiki type documentation and etc. But I will surely propose to have this commenting system, which I think it will make the documentation much better. The way to this wull be to integrte the commenting system with forum. The reason to this, we can have a centralize place for comments in organize view. So any reply to the documentation can be monitored in this forum community, and we can have an easy moderation to all the comments being made on the docs. WIth this, we also have all comments being corresponding to the specific doc part as well, so we know this comment/dicussion is being directed to what docs section.

Hope I explaint it clearly, because I’m explaining this while watching a movie. lol

Quote from: Djamoer at Jan 30, 2006, 01:46 AM

The way to this wull be to integrte the commenting system with forum. The reason to this, we can have a centralize place for comments in organize view. So any reply to the documentation can be monitored in this forum community, and we can have an easy moderation to all the comments being made on the docs. WIth this, we also have all comments being corresponding to the specific doc part as well, so we know this comment/dicussion is being directed to what docs section.

I think I understand you:

You want people to comment on the documentation in the forums rather than directly on to the documentation itself. These comments would be written in a format that includes the documentation section it relates to. This way, if certain comments are agreed upon, they get copied over to the documentation.

Is that what you meant, Wendy?

I really dislike Wikis too. They’re just TOO unstructured. The same exact thought was virtually univerally shared by all the barcamp/mashpit guys this weekend, and barcamp stuff is heavily built on wikis

All we need to do is to turn on comments to existing documentation and have a notification script/request system for missing/outdated items. Treat the comments just like we do our comments on the blog entries. (Only maybe allow rich text...)

Ok guys, I’m sorry with my previous post. I will quote it myself and fix it myself as well.

Here is the right version of my post

I’m agree to the commenting system 100%. I’m not gonna participate in this wiki type documentation and etc discussion. But I will surely propose to have this commenting system, which I think it will make the documentation much better. The way to this will work is to integrate the commenting system with forum. The reason to this, we can have a centralize place for comments in organize view. So any reply to the documentation can be monitored in this forum community, and we can have an easy moderation to all the comments being made on the docs. With this, we also have all comments being corresponding to the specific doc part as well, so we know this comment/dicussion is being directed to what docs section.

Hope I explaint it clearly, because I’m explaining this while watching a movie. lol

Quote from: Kunal at Jan 30, 2006, 10:34 AM

I think I understand you:

You want people to comment on the documentation in the forums rather than directly on to the documentation itself. These comments would be written in a format that includes the documentation section it relates to. This way, if certain comments are agreed upon, they get copied over to the documentation.

Is that what you meant, Wendy?

That’s almost correct, but the comment doesn’t have to be synchronize like what explain above.
Here is the detailed system decription. It’s kinda technical, but I believe everybody in here, some way or another know about programming.

1. We need to have a specific forum/category in our community specific to documentation. This will be locked, so users only able to reply to an existing topic, and they won’t be able to create a new topic, but they can still delete/modify their post like what we have right now in our forum.
2. Create an automation plugin tool that will create a new topic in that comment forum, everytime there is a new section being made on the documentation.
3. Create a snippet that will be able to to fetch a forum topic just like newsletter snippet, which support pagination, and etc, from all that specific forum topic.
4. Create a simple posting form snippet, with bb code ability maybe, just like in the forum, to allow user login to be able to post a reply as a comment for that specific documentation section.

The reason that I propose to have this kind of system in place, because it’s a lot easier for use to monitor all the comments being made to the documentation. To be honest, I’m personally never gone into the documentation section, so I can’t help moderate all the comments being made on there. If we have this integrate don our forum community, when there is a new comment being made, we can actually get notified indirectly from the recent post topic and etc. Another reason to this, we have one point of community to handle everything. So we don’t have to maintain several accounts just to achieve this, which is it’s kinda the way that we need to do if we use a wiki system. With this approach, the moderator in the forum can be assigned as the moderator for the documentation comment forum as well. If there is a post that is unecessary to the docs, we can just remove it, or we can politely ask the person to remove it or move the post to other forum topic that best suited, and it’s a lot easier to be handled by the forum system, which is that’s the basic functionality of forum.

Any feedback will be awesome.

Sincerely,

Quote from: Djamoer at Jan 30, 2006, 02:25 PM

Any feecback will be awesome.

I’m all for that! I think that’s a great idea. Combined with the PDFing idea from earlier, the documentation will be far better than any other OS CMS Project.:

Quote from: Bravado at Jan 29, 2006, 02:15 PM

I’ve been looking a little bit on ways to output the content of pages to PDF. This might help alot with the official documentation.

Sounds like a plan to me, djamoer.

I initially voted for a wiki but I’ve changed my mind, I’m relying way too heavily on the documentation to risk little errors creeping into it.

At least with the commenting system, it’s possible to have that level of separation between user updates and the official documentation.

All ways round using SMF integration is going to be easier to manage, from the viewpoint of the team and the community - personally, I already have too many logins to various forums etc. and don’t really fancy having another to worry about.

It’s also good from the angle of illustrating one way in which SMF could be integrated with a MODx site, and a demonstration of just how flexible MODx is.

Just my 2 cents,

Garry

Quote from: garryn at Jan 30, 2006, 02:42 PM

I initially voted for a wiki but I’ve changed my mind, I’m relying way too heavily on the documentation to risk little errors creeping into it.

I’ve done exactly the same thing. I’ve also changed my mind. I’m considering on resetting and changing the poll to this new idea.

Sounds very interesting indeed. I need to think on it a bit, but a great proposal. The only challenge that immediatly comes to mind is the complex formatting nature of the documentation, particularly the API docs and the length of some of the documentation and layout including images.

I’m thinking it might not be quite so easy as it seems at first, although in an ideal world it’d be the best solution. Perhaps, and we should have a good RSS feed system that can notifiy of new comments, and a dedicated documentation team.