Hi all!
Maybe this is the time of the year (at least in the christian world)
where many people have time to give thought to general subjects and make
up plans for the new year.
I do plan to spent some of my time and effort on OFBiz in 2007.
Now what I have been asking myself is:
Is there any ongoing effort to provide a properly edited set of manuals
for OFBiz? What I mean is any effort to come up with a properly edited
manual, consistently edited and kept up to date, which might even be
published as a traditional book (either through a publisher or via print
on demand) or the like.
Given the nature of OFBiz, such a manual would probably have to have
several volumes, such as:
1. Technical Reference Manual
Covering the technical aspects of how to install, run and maintain
OFBiz. The target audience would be system administrators that don't
necessarily care about any content in OFBiz but would like to understand
what app / web containers they have to provide, how to plug OFBiz into
any SSO systems, what logfiles to watch, how to do backup and restore,
howto upgrade, ...
2. Customization and User's Guide / Evaluation Guide
This would be the manual for any super user kind of people. This manual
would assume that someone installed an instance of OFBiz for you and
you're the one who is supposed to make it work for the company.
So this manual would cover subjects such as: Setting up reference data,
how to capture customers, how to record an order, how to print an
invoice, how to customize the invoice layout, how to ...
This would probably also be the book which people will use even without
an installation to make up their mind if OFBiz is for them or not.
3. Developer's Guide
This would cover how to customize and extent the functionality of OFBiz.
Maybe this should have two major sections, which are framework
development (how to extend the frameworks) and business oriented
development (how to implement new use cases with the framework).
I understand that some of that material is there somehwere on the site,
but due to the history of OFBiz, there are three or even more places in
the meanwhile where documentation is stored and maintained (or not
maintained, but still staying around).
Now that the new infrastructure gets setup after graduation from the
Incubator, maybe it's a good time to think about a documentation
subproject which will maintain a properly edited set of manuals for OFBiz.
WDYT?
I found that indeed may very successful Open Source projects have
extremely good and properly organized documentation, for example
Hibernate or Type 3 to name just two of them.
I have some prior experience of how it doesn't work (I am a committer in
another Apache project, though I haven't done a lot there recently) and
I have been authoring computer books before.
My time is limited, so I cannot do this alone, but if the PMC of the
project feels like it's worth the effort, I would try and help with
getting this started.
Regards,
Torsten
