First, it is not my intention to offend the creators of the current help system, or to suggest they made bad decisions or something like that. I just have a different vision that I want to explain.
My line of thought goes something like this: if you want to get a really extensive documentation, nobody is going to manage to do this on their own, or even with a few people. (A lot of kudo's to Jordi for doing all this work so far on the current help sections). To document something big like OSG extensively, the community needs to get involved. Then basically the system that you use to accommodate this can be seen as a social medium. And with social media, the exact details of how a social medium works, feels and looks are really important (just read any research on social media if you don't believe me). Therefore the choice between Joomla and Wiki or another system might be more important that some of you suggest, even if technically they have similar functionality. I don't know much of the details about the psychology of this all, but somehow, the system of wiki has proven itself over and over again. There seems to be something about it that allows community to build good and thorough documentation. I've seen it so often, that I'm kinda surprised by how negative you all react to the idea, like I'm suggesting something really weird. I could name many examples of excellent wiki's for many well known projects and games and what not, but I'll spare you the list... This is by the way the first time I ever suggest a wiki, or work with wiki's myself, so I'm not some kind of weird wiki supporter if you might think that :) I haven't worked with Joomla much, but I did program some exporters for it once, and I have a decent idea of how it works. For the purpose of a community build documentation it might be a bit too complex and I believe it is designed more for webmasters than for communities. Wiki's are a bit more simplistic and quicker to edit if I'm correct. Wiki pages are probably also easier to generate so that a good structure can be created that would accommodate guides and tutorials as well as in depth details of classes and functions (information that I, for example, would feel confident adding if I learn something specific about a class or function). Regarding you comment about finding documentation, the documentation button on the main page could link to the separate documentation system. Then all documentation could be placed there, in a single location. I think that would actually make it easier for people to find what they are looking for. It's really not uncommon to have a few separate sections for stuff like main pages, documentation and forums. I don't really agree that it is necessarily better to keep going with the current system. The more you add to it, the harder it will be to migrate to another system in the future. But I'm not here to push my ideas on to you. I'm not a developer of OSG and whatever you decide I'm fine with. I just try to explain my vision on it as good as I can, and then I'll shut up about it... ------------------ Read this topic online here: http://forum.openscenegraph.org/viewtopic.php?p=60866#60866 _______________________________________________ osg-users mailing list osg-users@lists.openscenegraph.org http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org
