Thanks for the detailed info, Mike. We're currently working on a much improved tutorial which likely fixes a good amount of points you're making. In particular, it explains how to do the "agavi-dist" stuff :)

It'll be quite useful for Felix (who does the main work on the rewrite), feedback like this helps a lot.

Thanks again,

David


On 04.03.2009, at 18:27, Mike Simons wrote:

Just FYI, you're supposed to make a copy of that and modify that, not the
original file (hence "-dist").

I gathered as much. I was just pointing it out because the tutorial
never mentioned anything of it ;)

Anyway, I've been through the tutorial up to the end of section 4 and
collated a whole bunch of feedback.
Most of it is non-technical but there are some technical issues I encountered.
Most of the suggestions are also subjective so feel free to discard if
they're not to your taste.

I've no more time to spend on this today but expect I should be able
to go through the rest of the tutorial tomorrow (Thursday 5th March)
evening.

For reference, this is against the version live @ March 4th 2009 15:32

I hope its useful in some regard.

Kind regards
Mike

-------------------

This feedback is from an experienced developer / agavi newbtard perspective.
As such it is mostly bits that make no sense (to me), are unclear (to
me), have layout issues, have issues encountered when following the
tutorial or are general observations.

Technical accuracy has not been verified in most places as I've not
had enough experience with agavi to corroborate or deny most of the
technical statements.

Also, it is based on downloading the Agavi tarball from
https://www.ohloh.net/p/agavi/download?filename=1.0.0.tgz
I have not checked whether the technical issues encountered are
apparent in the pear install.

General issues.
 Discoverability;
 Perhaps provide more fine grained navigation for each page at the
top of the page. (like the Zend Framework user manual does)
 This would make it easier to navigate for users looking for
something specific given that this is almost the only documentation
available on the Agavi site at present.

 Selected text is red on dark grey; very hard to read. (Conkeror on
Debian lenny at least)

Layout is a bit cramped in places. Maybe a bit more top / bottom padding?

1.4
1. App execution flow is unlikely to get absorbed at such an early stage.
    Maybe worth moving it lower down so that a developer has some
context to place the information in these pages.

2.0
 1. where is the stage 1 tarball?

2,1
1. no information about agavi executable or script being called agavi-dist.
    This may be because I downloaded the tarball.

2.2
 1. No mention of the rather verbose output of this script. Not a big
issue though.

2.4
 1. .htaccess needed some massaging for it to work (commented out
RewriteBase & changed rewrite_module to mod_rewrite.c)

3.0
 1. Where is the stage 2 tarball?
 2. Perhaps put routing before the "creating actions and views" so
that it'll work immediately after writing the code?

3.2
 1. I missed the "populate dummy data" between the sql and the tip.
Maybe make this more prominent or provide some dummy data in the SQL?

 2. I also did not have to remove the welcome action beyond removing
the Bloggie/pub/welcome folder and the Bloggie/app/Welcome folder. Did
I miss some?

3.4
 1. First paragraph makes no sense. Actions spawned from template? I
thought they were spawned from the execution filter method runAction?
Using project configuration system? What project configuration system?
    May just be terminology but I still don't understand what this
sentence is supposed to mean.

 2. '''it must name ("appoint") a View ''' - One or the other? I
initially read this as "the application must name appoint view" which
clearly makes no sense.

3. 'Remember: Newly created' - half way down the page. Should be a tip?

 4. No mention of strict validation (or instructions how to relax it
for simplification purposes)

 5. tip about post_id and validation is a bit lengthy. Split in to
multiple tips / reword?

 6. agavi automagic script created a decorator for me so full html
wasn't required.

 7. Templates reference template data as $template. Agavi automagic
app configured my app to use $t.

4.0
 1. Where is the directory of the tutorial?

4.1
 1. executeXXX return view names in all Bloggie actions. Is the
initial "what are layers" section inaccurate beacuse it doesn't
mention anything about returning view name.

 2. "decorator" is standard terminology for such a template so its
not agavi slang ;)

4.2
1. Tutorial states that we'll add RSS to output types later. This is untrue.

4.3
 1. $slots has nothing in it from default configuration but this page
states it should have ShowNavigation

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