On Nov 13, 2008, at 8:01 AM, Christopher Schmidt wrote: > > For the record, I see this as being somewhat similar to the > Plone/MapServer situation, where Jeff and Howard are trying to move > away > from managing the docs thrugh Plone and instead manage thrugh SVN. In > theory, managing through Plone offered great benefits for allowing the > community to contribute -- but in practice, it's just a pain in the > keyster.
Yes, we (MapServer's documentation effort) is looking to copy a lot of what OpenLayers does for documentation currently. A community website like Plone ends up taking way too much administrative effort, and the lack of administrative manpower has been one of the great limiting factors of the MapServer website. We're moving away from Plone and to just using rst and svn because users contribute practically zero documentation, and the Plone site ends up just being in the way of the developers/documenters. There's always the wiki where a user can drop tidbits of info that can eventually be folded into regular documentation. I would argue that in comparison to the 1.0 MapServer website, the current one was moderately successful in its organization, quite successful in the migration of the docs from docbook to rst, and a complete and utter failure as a community website. A wiki is insufficient for the reasons that Chris outlined, but a giant do-all site like MapServer's current one would end up failing without the manpower to make it go. I think the happy medium is a static website with the content driven from svn, and a spam-protected wiki that users can garden for information that needs to migrate its way into the docs. MapServer's infrastructure was *almost* this before the current incarnation except for: - docbook was a giant hurdle for people to write docs - our wiki gathered way too much spam (this was before captcha, etc became popular and OSGeo came along with enough momentum to make a single sign-on worth the hassle) - cvs made branching and tagging fun! We (mostly I, but others helped ;) swung the pendulum too far past the mark, but eventually we'll oscillate to it. Howard _______________________________________________ Dev mailing list Dev@openlayers.org http://openlayers.org/mailman/listinfo/dev
