Ian,

Jacopo and myself have replied to your second posting within the last few hours, please check the mailing list and we can continue any discussions on that thread. Please don't feel frustrated, we do appreciate your work.

Thanks
Scott

Ian McNulty wrote:
David,

I'm getting really confused here.

David E. Jones wrote:
Having a large OOTB end-user community would certainly benefit the project, in really major ways too. The problem is that the current contributing community does not have sufficient resources to create and maintain what would be needed to satisfy this sort of user.

It is generally accepted that one of the main things all OOTB end-users need is accessible end-user documentation.

In OFBiz End-User Documentation > OFBiz End User Docs Home > Areas Being Worked On, David E. Jones wrote:

There is a lot of work to be done on editing and structuring and reformatting the OFBiz documentation. In short, we need your help!

You can find the PDF exports from the Undersun end-user documentation site here <http://docs.ofbiz.org/display/OFBENDUSER/Undersun+Doc+Site+PDF+Exports>.

As far as I can tell, half-completed fragments of various attempts to translate the Manager Reference PDFs are currently scattered over at least 6 other locations in the Wiki (for details see my comments at http://docs.ofbiz.org/display/OFBENDUSER/Areas+Being+Worked+On ). There can be no doubt that most end-users will find this very confusing and frustrating indeed.

To help address the problem of the lack of resources in the current contributing community, I decided to commit a considerable amount of my own time to answering David's request for help by translating all 12 of the Manager References in their entirety to Wiki format in one location.

This work has now been completed. I was not given access to the end User Docs space so have put them in my personal Confluence space at http://docs.ofbiz.org/display/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/Manager+References

I posted news of this on the ML on the 3 March with a request that they might now be transferred out of my to the End User Docs space - but had absolutely no response whatsoever!

I reposted this request under a new thread again on the 5 March - and had absolutely no response again!

I understand that most of the core team is currently engaged in the Developer's Hackathon in Ephraim. But they are still posting here on a raft of other issues. What am I to make of what would appear to be their complete lack of interest in this one?

BTW. Just to be clear on this, I am not looking for any thanks or brownie points or engaging in any other kind of attention seeking whatsoever. I understand that other members of this community have committed considerably more to this project than I have and that my contribution is very minor in comparison.

What I am looking for is:

1) some kind of acknowledgement that the translated Manager Reference PDFs can, at some time in the future, be transferred to a more public section of the Wiki where they can be more easily accessed by end-users and further amended and developed by those more qualified than myself

2) some kind of solution to the cloud of confusion currently existing in the user documentation, with half-completed fragments of various attempts to translate the Manager Reference PDFs currently scattered over at least 6 other locations in the Wiki.

How unreasonable a request is that?

Ian




David E. Jones wrote:

On Mar 5, 2007, at 6:57 PM, Jonathon -- Improov wrote:

David (Jones),

What about those open source projects that are polished for OOTB convenience and experience? Even Apache (httpd) and Tomcat (both under Apache Licence 2.0?) have better OOTB "operational readiness" than OFBiz. Ie, they work well OOTB and they have very good and widely published docs to further fuel explosive rate of community development. (I understand you believe that approach won't benefit OFBiz; I don't know so I can't say.)

Yeah, I guess I like Jacopo's point that it would be better to quite me than speak for me. In this I don't believe I even said/wrote anything like that.

Having a large OOTB end-user community would certainly benefit the project, in really major ways too. The problem is that the current contributing community does not have sufficient resources to create and maintain what would be needed to satisfy this sort of user. Hopefully that will change in the future. In the mean time, the project is self-sustaining and growing based on use by non-OOTB users and contributors (or those that are OOTB users, but just extremely patient... ;) ).

-David



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