I'll probably have more thoughts later, but a few general things that struck me initially:
On Nov 30, 1:12 am, "Mike Orr" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > First we have to determine what the right spaces are. :) The Cookbook > was meant to be the place for HOWTOs, tutorials, and code examples, > and I'd like to limit it to that. +1. That's what my expectation is when I hear 'Cookbook'. I think it's clear that breaking things up into more logical and digestible spaces is the right thing to do. What sucks is this is an area where the usability of Confluence really breaks down IMO. To be honest, I've come to appreciate a lot of the power and manageability it offers, but only after having spent a good deal of time with it now. It took a long time to get used to the way the 'spaces' are divided, partly because a lot of truly useful stuff for a new user has always been in the Cookbook, but mostly because the 'Dashboard' page totally blows. It's an intimidating laundry list with no UI friendliness to suggest relative importance of anything on it. Chances are, Official Docs and the Cookbook are the most frequently sought destinations, but you wouldn't know it. Basically, you're not intuitively guided to things, you just eventually learn where they are, and that's obviously not good for new users. It leads you to think that 'the docs suck', when they're really quite deep. It doesn't help that the pylonshq 'Docs' tab lands you on the Official Docs section (also hard to swallow at a glance, btw), and 'Wiki' puts you on the evil Dashboard. The relationship isn't entirely clear until you figure it out. I know that's kind of a vestigial Trac remnant. Lastly, it's web design 101 material that wide columns of text on the web are an atrocity. That's the most painful thing about looking at the wiki all the time for me. The right-hand gutter in the Django docs lends to their consistent look and readability. For all the praise their docs get, I don't think they're that much better than Pylons', they're just multitudes more approachable. I don't know that there's an easy answer to this stuff, unless it's a SuperWiki, and who's to say when that may be? Are there some additional page templates for Confluence that might help us make it less, erm, like an online textbook? I didn't mean for this to turn in to such a rant/bitchfest about Confluence. As I said, from a *maintainer's* perspective it's really pretty nice, so I understand the motivations. But I hope it's constructive commentary if we do move toward eating our own dog food on the wiki front. As a side note, if it has the blessing of the fine leaders, my thinking in creating the page for suggested doc improvements was that it could be linked from the 'Contributing' area. I swore there was such a thing (in Community), but ironically I can't find it now. -- Ches Martin --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "pylons-discuss" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/pylons-discuss?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
