I would like to challenge the assumption that we need to ship the help/guide wiki pages with Bloodhound by default.
I believe our users and us are better served by adding local documentation as an optional plug-in. In any default installation of Bloodhound there should be only a single "What you need to know" page of documentation, short enough to be printed out on a single A4 sheet of paper. The recent conversations on where documentation should live were the trigger to me thinking about this [1]. From a community perspective this change would bring more people back to our site, which must be a good thing. From a user perspective they're guaranteed to get the latest documentation for their version. For example when better documentation on 0.5 is available after the release of 0.5, they wouldn't find this in their locally installed version. It also encourages us to keep documentation up to date because it has a more direct impact on the community, and we can gather some insights on what people struggle with by analysing what information they look up frequently. I could go into more about "one version of the truth" and "online repository of versioned documentation" but I hope the benefits are clear enough already. I will have a stab at putting together this one page of documentation that should still be shipped with every version of Bloodhound over the next week if I hear no major objections. There are more details to figure out like how to host it exactly and how to link to it from within the application. Any thoughts on that? Cheers, Joe [1] http://markmail.org/thread/75ckqyuxmbgaw327 -- Joe Dreimann | User Experience Designer | WANdisco @jdreimann
