> > > > If we can do all this then I'll be +1 :), but presently I'm -0.5 on the > > > > sample you created. > > > > I do have a comment about your posting. The subject line on the email that > > led me to the sample was "prototype FAQ". > > Sorry if that was misleading. I certainly never meant to say I was going > to commit without feedback.
I never really thought you would, just that the subject line seemed a bit dramatic was all! > > Thanks very much for your additional comments. Unfortunately, things are > getting more and more complicated. Yeah, they normally do that! > > Regarding any sort of "templating" system. I certainly support this, but > it seems to me that the technology for this is very much in flux, and I > have no idea what is a good long-term way to implement this. In addition, > I don't see any point in doing it just for the FAQ (although perhaps the > FAQ could be the first thing looked at). That was the intention I had in mind, although I may not have articulated it :) > The entire set of documentation > and the entire set of web sites could use a similar system. It is a huge > job even to begin a project like that, and I don't have the experience to > do it well. Well, there are people around who've tackled such jobs, so just keep asking questions and they'll normally jump in with answers. > > There are "FAQ-O-Matic" type applications out there (See a FAQ related > thread from last week). However, I'm not sure that we really want to > replace our official FAQ with one of those. Do others disagree? Hmmm, I was thinking more of apps that allow you to have the data in one place and publish an FAQ. I mean, I've done some work with technology that allows documents to be made into a pdf on the fly, so it'd be cool if when it came to printing the user could specify the questions they wanted and it created a pdf with just those questions on it. (OK, so I'm dreaming but it's a nice thgouht isn't it :)) Going even further into dream land it'd be cool if we could do it for the entire documentation. why not have a central store that we dump into html for a release of the server but allow people to access it in a lot of different formats from the main web site? (I'll wake up now!) > > At a certain point, we may need to choose a 'second best' solution here so > that we can move on and do it. Yeah, and I guess it'll just be a series of html pages :) Anyway, I hit freshmeat with a search for faq and this is a selection of what I got... (NB I didn't really care about the licence/perl/python/c/c++ etc this is just a list.) http://faq-system.sourceforge.net/ (sample is broken - doh!) http://fox.twu.net/tech/code/faqprocessor/ http://www.codegrunt.com/ http://www.cis.rit.edu/~sdlpci/Software/perl/#FAQ http://www.lodestar2.com/software/makefaq/faq.html http://marginalhacks.com/Hacks/make_faq/ http://opensource.yourdecor.on.ca/faq1/ I'd have to say that none are perfect and they do all focus on FAQ's. david
