One idea I was thinking about recently might improve the documentation more efficiently. Once we decide on how to display the docs on the Derby site (whether we use an Eclipse infocenter or Forrest or some other method), we could use a script to insert PHP into the topic files so that users browsing our documentation could add comments dynamically to the topics. I got this idea because PHP's own documentation implements this exact function, and they use their own product to do it. If you look at any page in their documentation, you'll see an "Add note" link at the bottom of the page that links to this form:
http://www.php.net/manual/add-note.php? I don't know PHP, and I dont know the limits and restrictions on the servers that host our files at Apache, so I can't say that I know the technical details of a project like this. But it seems like it could be easy enough. An even more useful idea might be to add a button to the bottom of each topic that allows users to open up a jira issue on that topic. Clicking the button opens a Jira issue form that is already populated with the topic title, id, and DITA source file, as well as the component being selected as a doc bug. The user would need only describe the actual problem and submit the form, provided they are already registered and logged in with JIRA. If we don't want to go that far, then maybe we just add links to the bottom of each page that allow users to post to this list or the Derby users list directly from an online form. Just brainstorming. What do people think of these ideas? Yes they are just ideas now but from a logical point of view they don't seem to be too hard to implement, and I would be happy to explore them in more depth...
