On Dec 11, 2:46 am, real_jax <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> - Documentation
> It seems almost as if all open source projects suffer from the same problem:
> Documentation.
> Farcry is, alas, no different. A wiki is not *the* answer to all
> documentation problems.

Was the 130 page developer course book of any use to you?
http://docs.farcrycms.org:8080/confluence/display/FCDEV40/Developer+Training+Course

> Especially not a wiki that has lots of open/dead ends, and makes things more
> confusing then provide clearity. Most of the answers I was seeking, answers
> to common questions, where found in the mailinglist. And that says it all. I
> am apparently not the only one.

It would be great if more people contributed documentation.  The
reason we have a WIKI is that it makes it easy anyone to contribute.
In fact if you have seen answers to questions not answered in the WIKI
on this list -- *anyone* on this list might add them to the WIKI.

In truth, writing technical documentation is difficult and by and
large unrewarding -- trust me, I wrote most of the hundreds of pages
of documentation that exist today and nobody ever says its enough.
Once people have the answer to a problem, they seldom make time to
contribute that knowledge back. We continue to improve the
documentation as we have time. And I suspect that in many areas the
depth of documentation may surprise you.

People need to point out what documentation they need most -- play
editor, indicate where things are not clear, and so on.  That assists
the community as a whole to focus on the areas of documentation that
need the most attention.

> How about something simple as little help popups/ tooltips on the farcry cms
> pages?
> Why is there, after so many years of development, no help system?

Actually there is :)

The problem is most regular users do not want to be weighed down by
the addition of inline hints and tooltips.  Especially when most
things in the UI itself are mainly self evident.  The user
documentation that is generally needed is "what is news and how do i
publish it?" and not "What does the Publish Date mean?".  So the level
of inline documentation tends to trend to minimal.

Historically the other issue has been i18n.  If you have ever
developed a localised solution you will know the pain involved in
every variation you make to any label anywhere in the UI.  Prior to
Fortress its been very tiresome to change labels and so we've not been
all that keen to try unless there is a very obvious need.

In 4.0 you can provide a help title and description for any fieldset.
As of the Fortress release [1] you can provide inline documentation
for all sub-section landing pages.

Of course we're open to suggestions!  Can you give examples of how you
think inline documentation would improve the UI?  It may be something
we can address immediately as part of the Fortress release.

-- geoff
http://www.daemon.com.au/

[1]: http://docs.farcrycms.org:8080/confluence/display/FCDEV40/Fortress+Roadmap
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