Hi Jacques:
I think it is a tool problem. I've come to believe, after 25+ years of
struggling with the best way to convey complex, multi-dimensional ideas
and concepts, that the "Wiki" format for documentation presentation is
just about useless for most users - especially new users. The problem,
as I see it is that a Wiki has only one dimension - even the most
carefully crafted Wiki has but one dimension - that of the Wiki itself.
A project such as OFBiz has many dimensions, is constantly changing and
has many target audiences.
Wikis seem to work best as repositories for small snippets of
information. Kind-of like a bunch of sticky notes positioned around the
office. The problem is that unless you were the author and depositor of
those sticky notes, others will only randomly happen upon them. Even
under the best search and organizational conditions, finding the right
set of sticky notes for the task at hand can be a real challenge.
My solution has been to fall back on writing traditional documentation
organized and targeted at specific audiences. I don't know if the
DocBookWiki would provide a framework for building more traditional (and
I would argue useful) information sources as I haven't looked at it. But
now that you have given me the idea, I am going to take a look.
Thanks Chris.
Just my 2 cents :-)
Ruth
Jacques Le Roux wrote:
Hi Chris,
I sincerely think it's not a tool problem but simply lack of community
organisation.
Also, despite the lack of organisation, lot efforts have already been
put in the wiki and moving to another support, DocBookWiki or
whatever, will need to be very carefully done!
Last but not least, the commuity ambition, would be to use OFBiz
itself to support its own wiki. Ambitious isn'it ?
Licence : Confluence is Atlassian property (as Jira which uses OFBiz
Entity Engine internally, BTW), in other word it's a commercial
product. But like some other companies, Atlassian offers graciously
some licences. I believe, the one we currently use was donated to
Undersun (the consulting company David and Andy created when the begin
to work on OFBiz) and is now used on an HWM server. In the meantime
(before using OFBize itself) we should move to Apacher servers since
Atlassian has also offered a licence to the ASF
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INFRA-1877. Confluence is
already used by other major ASF projects : Geronimo, ServiceMix, to
list a few...
HTH
Jacques
From: "Christopher Snow" <[email protected]>
I was wondering how useful people find the ofbiz wiki.
It seems that there is a lot of very good information on the wiki,
but it just doesn't seem to be structured (structure is precisely
what new users need, along with product stability).
I've been looking at the DocBookWiki project and although it has a
long way to go to be usable, it allows you to structure your wiki
like you would a book - see example on
http://doc-book.sourceforge.net/books/. It also has links to
generate different formats from your wiki including docbook, html and
pdf.
What is the license for the contents of the ofbiz wiki? Would I be
allowed to use the content on the wiki and combine it into another
format?
Many thanks,
Chris
