What's the Wiki intended for? A Wiki doesn't strike me as all that
suitable for storing documentation itself; the format is much too loose
and.. wiki-ish. They're great for whiteboarding, and I could sort of see
the value of Wiki-like capabilities in a commenting component and maybe
as an authoring tool for internal developer FAQs, but I think if some of
the targets here are:
1. Low-barrier authoring of professional-quality structured docs
2. Low-barrier, robust versioning and workflow tools
3. "Natural", low-effort content organization and indexing
4. Low-barrier public annotation for collecting corrections and improvements
..the Zope-to-CVS approach seems the most promising for the overall
system, as it's a robust, high-level CMS toolkit out of the box, and
this sort of thing has been done before quite successfully with it. Zope
was made for building collaborative authoring systems and large,
hierarchical document databases. The only other comparably successful
documentation effort I've seen is PHP's--but nice as the PHP team's
annotated documentation system is, there's otherwise a lack of the other
pieces (workflow, versioning, generic CMS forms tools, et al) and there
would be a lot more reinventing of the wheel. Building a docs CMS from
the ground up in raw Perl or Python (or Java or RPG or Forth or Logo)
seems needlessly NIH.
Whatever happens, I hope the best (most efficient and productive) tools
are put into play for the docs project and that we don't end up with the
lowest-common-denominator just because that's how open-source projects
supposedly get developed. From the outside, this is how it sometimes looks.
I do think the folks prototyping a Zope system would help their cause if
they got it hosted on a machine that someone would keep running. I'd
offer use of my own Zope installation but I just don't have enough disk
quota for versioned Mozilla docs.
There's a nice port of Wiki available in Zope. Are you using that or the
genuine Perl standalone?
-sk
John Keiser wrote:
> I am making a Wiki for us to experiment with and do with what we will
> (as soon as I figure out how to make freezope do permissions it will be
> online and ready to go). This may help soften the debate, as people
> will be able to create monolithic entry pages as they choose.
>
> --John
