Hi Ruth,
We could also organize things the same way than in a book in Confluence.
It has all we need for that, but as long as we don't coordinate our work any
kind of tool will not be useful regarding this issue
I still think it's an organisation problem. But how to organize the work of a free community is another question that any authoring
tool will not resolve intrinsically.
Also, I remember one of the things that made the community considers Confluence a good tool for our use was the possibility it
offers with permissions.
As I already said these projects use also Confluence (on Apache infrastructure)
http://servicemix.apache.org/home.html
http://geronimo.apache.org/
As you can see, there are a "bit more" organised than our Wiki. For instance, only the left part allows to embrace the project at a
glance. Something we definitively lack at http://docs.ofbiz.org/dashboard.action
I think we can do as good if we decide to do it. For the most part, this does not depend of the tool, or even the kind of tool you
use, it depends of the women/men who use them.
I don't know if it's a lack of community maturity or an inclination of our community, or more certainmy a trivial lack of
ressources, ie manpower... (Geronimo and ServiceMix have both big supporters...)
Jacques
From: "Ruth Hoffman" <[email protected]>
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
