New guy offers input on documentation

Quote from: lukwe at Jun 26, 2006, 10:49 AM

Isn’t this the perfect situation for a Wiki ?!?
Surely it would help in categorizing support arguments, a much better approach than searching the forums and reading threads!

Being a collaborative effort it would also stimulate contributions from users; one can write without feeling the pressure of being officially in charge for the documentation.

BTW I find the current ’Documentation’ section on the site pretty clear and well written; too bad it’s incomplete.

I was going to recommend the same thing - a wiki - for documentation. A good example of this being done for a CMS is wiki.mamboguru.com. All of the posts are by active members of the community and one or two devs. But it is a very good example.

I am new here too--- racking my brain to get familiar with this setup. I would love to have an official wiki where I could submit my findings and howto’s. So anyone want to wiki?

Chuck

Can anyone recommend a good looking, simple wiki that should run well on PHP5?

The one being used on mamboguru.com is media wiki at http://www.mediawiki.org/.

I have seen some complete newbies begin posting on it in an hour or less. (Tho I admit, I haven’t done more than browse through it).

Chuck

Quote from: ProWebscape at Jun 26, 2006, 09:10 PM

So anyone want to wiki?

I do. Then I could submit my discoveries as I go. I could help out without taking ownership of the whole project which I don’t have time for for the foreseeable future.

I have played with mediawiki, and it’s really nice.

Aside from Mediawiki which is probably perfect (free and PHP!); Docuwiki ( http://wiki.splitbrain.org/wiki:manual ) is specifically created for documenting applications, see a complete implementation example: http://www.k5n.us/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=start\

Here’s a few other resources that can help us choosing the right tool:

http://www.wikimatrix.org/

http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2004/11/04/which_wiki.html

I also like MediaWiki, and it is probably the one most people are familiar with.

Quote from: ppaul at Jun 26, 2006, 07:56 AM

It would also be a great leap forward, if someone would manage the contents of these forums.
Information about a specific topic ("how do I set up this or that snippet...") are often cluttered about several forums and threads.
This task does not require a pro documentation-writer, but someone who cares for the forums, eliminates redundancies, changes/corrects titles, renames and moves threads to another forum and so forth.
Establishing a structure and logic which could make using the forums much more effective. One forum for each snippet, binding-method, module could be a starting point.

I agree with everything you say. Efforts are being made, including by myself. I’ve not actually been on much the past week or so, but one of my personal objectives as a new mod is to rename vague and incorrect subject titles.

I absolutely agree with a forum for each major snippet; I also think that "writing snippets", "using snippets others have written" and "requesting snippets" need to be split out.

Some imminent changes will resolve these issues. I would however, still be interested to hear how you would structure the forums. If you could kindly PM me with your thoughts I would be grateful.

I’m guessing that within the next 24 hours or sooner you’ll see our repository solution released. It creates (automatically) a forum topic for each asset added. Each resource can also have hacks, additions, alternate features and so forth attached as "extras", to keep it all organized under one roof.

Lobbing in an unofficial vote for a wiki as well.

Considering these. Some say mediawiki doesn’t perform well under heavy usage (see Wordpress implementation).