Hi all,
Along with this kind of notifying post to the mailing list, I'm also
keeping a blog of my Daisy Documentation work:
http://www.planetcocoon.com/blog/category/daisy (or there's an RSS feed
here: http://www.planetcocoon.com/blog/category/daisy/feed) This post
is from http://www.planetcocoon.com/node/2276.
- o -
Last night I refactored, edited and added some content to the existing
Daisy repository according to the structure discussed yesterday
afternoon. I also began the process of converting some Wiki content to
Daisy.
I created a CategoryInDaisy page in the Wiki, so that it is easy to
record a wiki page as having been transferred. Perhaps we could have
CategoryDaisyInProgress, CategoryDaisyComplete? I also recorded on the
Wiki page where a piece of content has gone (i.e. a Wiki page may be
split or combined).
After about 3 hours solid Daisy usage (as a consumer rather than as a
developer) I'm quite impressed. The positives for me so far are:
* The usability of the WYSIWYG editor is good, and I only needed to
swap into raw HTML view a few times (to remove <p> tags within pasted
<li> for example).
* Daisy was very quick and responsive (with occasional pauses/slow
round-trips).
* The "Duplicate" feature is very useful in refactoring work (i.e.
splitting one page into two or more).
* Easy and intuitive editing of the navigation map.
On the other hand, the negatives are:
* Newly created pages are invisible until they are published (by
someone with publishing rights). It's a little like flying blind. I had
to remember document IDs in order to cross-link (unpublished pages
don't show up in the link chooser). I couldn't review my newly created
pages unless I edited them (if I view a newly created page I just see
"This document is not yet published.").
* I had to edit the navigation structure to see my changes. Again,
adding document IDs/labels to this structure had to be done from
memory.
* Switching between the navigation structure editor and the page
editor was tedious. I understand the power of this separation, but from
a usability point of view it would be nice to make the management of a
page's location possible from the page itself.
I think it's going to prove difficult for editors to make significant
structural changes due to this lack of visibility and immediate
feedback. Incidentally, despite not having publish permissions, I can
still see a checkbox saying "Publish changes immediately" when I edit a
page.
I may have overlooked better ways of using Daisy, so please let me know
if there are things I could do differently! As Upayavira said: "As to
whether this is the right way - I'm sure there are more technically
perfect approaches. The thing about this one is that it has the
community behind it[...] And that has to be worth something."
Steven, Helma, et al, keep up the great work on Daisy!
Mark
