David Crossley wrote:
Gav.... wrote:
From: David Crossley
C. Grobmeier wrote:
Gavin wrote:
Here is one such thread :-
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=forrest-dev&m=112277290808391&w=2
Can't seem to find the one where I was involved at the moment,
Will have another look later.
Thanks. That links to some of the past discussion too.
We need to review those threads, some great ideas evolved.
Thank you very much. I read it and understand, that you don't want a
wiki cause it's to early for this project. You fear that docs are in the
wiki but not in the core docs, that the PMC can't oversight the entries
and so on.
I see a wiki more as a sandbox. It contents small artifacts of users who
don't want to get involved in the mailinglist or of users who don't want
to start creating a patch. Sometimes a wiki makes things easier. It
works for Commons and i think for Struts too.
But i -really- don't want to bring this old discussion back to life
cause i am new to this project and hope to see your reasons more clearly
when i am deeper into it. I just was curious cause many projects use a
wiki but Forrest don't.
Well one reason is our history and purpose. We are
our own documentation system. Open your text editor,
tweak our doc sources in site-author/ and review
them with 'forrest run'. However we have received
very few documentation patches.
The above linked to an important proposal discussion
which has not yet been implemented. Either use Lenya
or piggyback on Cocoon's Daisy.
[PROPOSAL] A CMS for our Docs
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.text.xml.forrest.devel/13450
I glanced through that again. If someone could help to
summarise it and make a new proposal, that would be
fantastic.
The Forrest project seems to be gaining some new energy
these days, so perhaps we can move forward.
It was a very long group of threads that started off as a proposal
For Daisy to become the CMS of choice, it turned into how can we
Make Lenya + Forrest work together, Lenya as the CMS of course, then
Forrest would publish Lenya published (committer approved) docs.
Hows that for a summary ? (er, only joking :) )
We have DOCO (DOCU ?) although I forget how far this has got and even
If this was its purpose.
A summary would be good and I'll try and do one shortly, but as for making
it a new proposal, I am unsure as to what to propose, does it need yet
Another discussion considering advances in Lenya, Forrest etc have changed
How we might go about such an integration. The thread obviously chooses
Lenya for the CMS part, are we happy with that or do we need to go through
Some more choices again? Are Lenya in a position to be able to help again
Where necessary?
I waited for a while to see if some other people would comment.
None, so i guess that means that people feel the same way as
me about this topic: not enough energy for integration exercises.
It sounds to me like there are not enough active developers here
to enable it.
Sorry for my delayed response - been really busy in none Forrest things
lately. Let me share my experiences and thoughts...
First of I wrote an HTMLEdit plugin that allowed Forrest sources to be
edited from within a Forrest webapp. This worked really well and I used
it quite a bit. But it was never community supported and I outgrew it
and needed a CMS.
I then wrote the Daisy plugin, it works pretty well, in fact Cocoon
currently uses it for their docs. However, it never attracted any
interest from a wider community. The Daisy project were not interested
as they didn't want to be dependant on Forrest for their static
publishing. Cocoon adopted it, but have never contributed to its
development and they now appear to be moving to a Maven based build
process (including docs).
Another CMS related solution, although specifically for educational
materials is the Eclipse plugin in the whiteboard. This code was brought
over from my Burrokeet project which integrated standards compliant
learning content into a Forrest generated site. However, I moved left
this project a couple of years ago and very little has happened on
either Burrokeet or Forrests Eclipse plugin.
There are devs here who are also devs at Lenya, hence the proposal of
creating a Lenya plugin. Unfortunately nobody has found the time to
realise that objective.
So, current integration of Forrest and a CMS is as good as dead in my
opinion. But that doesn't mean it can't be revived there are plenty of
good examples of how to go about it in our SVN history, of course these
also contain examples of mistakes to avoid).
If you want to pursue this, then perhaps just investigate
a small part of it, e.g. one suggestion was to ask Cocoon
if we could have a small section of their Daisy to use
as a doc scratchpad, but leaving our main documentation
as it is now.
This can be up and running with minimal effort since we already proved
it works within Cocoon. But there are problems with this approach,
performance being one of them (I can explain the technical reasons for
this if anyone wants to pursue it, lets have a new subject for this though).
I'd love to explore all this in the context of my RT on Forrest 2. I
don't have an immediate need for CMS integration, but I do have had some
thoughts about it with respect to the problems I identify in that
thread (many of which come from my work integrating with Daisy and other
applications at clients).
Even with just that, there are still many issues to be
investigated, e.g. restricted edit access, backup of sources,
how to maintain oversight of diffs, define the exact purpose, etc.
important considerations, much of which I have answers for ;-)
I don't want to squash your enthusiasm, but we don't want
you spending effort if the rest of the project is not behind it.
So it is a good idea of yours, to explore the high-level first.
Personally i would rather work with the doc system we have now
and concentrate on the 0.8 release.
Yes, this is the same concern I have wrt my Forrest 2.0 RT. Having said
that, a better doc system may help address the docs issues identified by
others in that thread.
Ross
