On Jan 20, 2007, at 1:25 AM, Ian McNulty wrote:
David,I can see where you're coming from on this. This project is better documented than anything else I've seen in the field.You yourself have produced a truly awesome amount of documentation. I don't know where you find the time. All are extremely well written, very clear, very well laid out. A model of their kind. (No I'm not sucking up - I mean it :) So what could possibly be the problem.I found the Introduction Videos and Diagrams page you link to here a couple of days ago myself.It was whilst working through these videos that the light bulb went off.What you're talking us through is a diagram of the wiring harness of a jumbo jet.Essential for the engineers who need to service it. Absolutely the last kind of map a pilot wants to find on his lap. Know what I mean?
Uh, yeah, that's because it is meant to cover the framework, not the applications. The two are very different, change very differently, need to be understood by different people in different ways, etc. My current estimate is that to produce something adequate for a "pilot", given that there are about 100 different "pilot" roles in OFBiz, would require many times the effort to produce that the framework videos with their diagrams, reference materials, transcriptions, etc. Right now I don't have the $500k to get into that... and the $40k already spent on the documents which are now PDF-dumped into the docs.ofbiz.org site was clearly inadequate, especially as it is mostly reference materials (which is why you won't find how-to stuff in the reference guides, they are references after all, just for reference purposes). The Application Overview for Users is probably more of what you're looking for, though that section only represents maybe 3-5% of what is in OFBiz right now.
Of course, that's assuming such documents could even be written in a way that is close to generally useful. How do I use it? Well, that depends on what you want to do... and unfortunately across a few different industries that list grows into hundreds of thousands of activities...
So, that's the big question with any document: who is the target audience? The more specific the answer, the better the document will address their needs. But who is the target audience for OFBiz? ... ?
-David
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