Cris,
Thanks for the info. Understand that it is a community effort.
Understand that deficiencies in documentation are already known.
Understand that many have added to it recently (Eric, Jen, Jason, ...).
I've tried to pitch in and help when I hurdle something that applies to
the group and belongs in the wiki, but it hasn't been much. I don't
believe that a project as complex as uPortal and that requires as much
tuning as uPortal does will be nearly as successful as it could be
without better documentation. I try to help on the list with things that
I can, but I don't feel confident enough with it to make changes in the
wiki documentation, because so much changes and there is so much I don't
know about it. I'm absolutely sure that many are in the same boat.
Consider this to be me begging those that decide what to do next for
uPortal development to consider even if only for a few seconds to
continue contributing even more time on documentation. If it were
possible to see a pie chart of the amount of time uPortal adopters have
spent trying to figure things out that were undocumented or spinning
their wheels/going down the wrong path because something was poorly
documented vs. the time that they spend on other uPortal activities
(development, deployment, maintenance) I think that it would be a
no-brainer for those contributing to uPortal to decide to spend more
time on documentation. The only reason I'm saying anything is because I
keep seeing questions on the list and feeling bad for all of the people
asking questions that they don't have better documentation that they
could be pointed to.
Gary
Cris J Holdorph wrote:
This is a community effort. To my knowledge (if I'm wrong please
correct me), the Jasig organization does not pay any developers to
make code changes. So there's no re-prioritization of Jasig from
developer activities that could occur in that way. Instead, we have
volunteer developers who donate either their personal time, or
institutions who donate time to work on uPortal. These individual and
institutions should have the ability to work on what's important
and/or interesting to them.
If someone feels the documentation needs to improve, the best way to
get that done, is not to reprioritize Jasig, it's to pitch in and
start helping with the documentation.
---- Cris J H
Gary Weaver wrote:
Eric Dalquist wrote:
The hard part is different versions of uPortal have different
options and configurations. If we don't split out the whole manual
we have to split each page as things change and that proves even
harder to track. Note that each manual space has a big note at the
top of the page stating which version of uPortal it is for and there
is navigation to each version of the manual there as well.
Although the 3.1 manual is not complete, should the link called
"uPortal 3 Manual" on http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/display/UPC/Home go
instead to the 3.1 space? That way people might be more likely to
find it.
I know that you and the rest of the team are spending time updating
the documentation when you can, and that there is a load of dev work
that currently has been given much greater priority, but it also
seems like it would reduce a lot of time spent in support on the
lists by cleaning up and adding to the documentation so that
questions like many of those asked would not need to be asked. I know
that you've thought of this already, and maybe it has been brought up
many times, but I think it is worth bringing up again just to see
whether Jasig would reconsider prioritizing documentation more, not
only to document what is being developed, but to clean up the
existing stuff. It will also help drive additional users to uPortal
if it is more well-documented.
Thanks,
Gary
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