[Geoserver-devel] Re: doc work

(ccing list, as these discussions should be open - we're talking about
doc organization)

Quoting Brent Owens <brentowens@anonymised.com>:

I'm not sure we need a separate GEOSDOC unless we want a more stable
tutorial area and a much more dynamic whiteboard-like community area.

Well, the key split is what will be exported and what will not. Though
I suppose you can choose which portions to export? At the very least I
think we want a dynamic area for RnD work, putting proposals up,
gathering requirements, ect.

As
long as we can easily get to each area just navigating with the
topmost
nav bar or on the side panel, then it should be fine. But if
navigation
is a pain, and it starts to look and act like two separate pages,
then
we should stick with having on main page area.

I was actually thinking the two separate nav bars were kinda nice. The
GEOS one links to the resources (email lists, user map, jira, support),
the GEOSDOC one helps you nav down to more specific doc topics

Blog
I like the blog idea Chris. It will make the page look more active
and
people will see things get done.

Tutorials
I usually find it easier to write the tutorial from scratch. It could
get tricky formatting it around excerpts/includes and also writing an
excerpt for your page that people will be able to use in several
different tutorials. Excerpts could be good for definitions though.
Or a
super quick 'download instructions' tutorial, something that fits in
5
lines. Either way, I think most pages should have an excerpt, but
what
we want that excerpt to have might depend.

This makes sense. Let's just write tutorials from scratch for now. If
it looks like there's text that we just seem to be maintaining in two
areas we can 'refactor', and use includes.

For links to other
tutorials,
I think we need to make them stand out more. And one color scheme
would
be nice. We could give the link a background color to make it stand
out
(I'm having issues doing that atm). It would be nice to have a little
green T, like the + or arrow, for a tutorial link. I fiddled around a
bit with this page
http://docs.codehaus.org/display/GEOSDOC/Example+Tutorial+Page
Maybe we should start a wiki convention page for some of these
things.

Sounds good.

Other
I think the GEOSDOCS page should be subdivided (internally with
headings) into # sections:
-Setup Geoserver
          Any setup or configuration
-How Geoserver Works
          Walkthroughs that describe a process in GS, such as
GetFeature, output strategies etc...
-Hack Your Own Geoserver Tutorials
          Step-by-step tutorials on hacking the GS code

There are getting to be a lot of links and it is beginning to be hard
to
find things

Yeah, the best thing to do may be to use the children page
functionality. Get a nice hierarchy. And we can have summary pages
that use the 'excerpt' stuff of their children, so users can drill down
into more specific areas.

I also think we have a couple of duplicate links on the docs page for
the same tutorial, but named a little differently. Might want to
check
it out dave.

Yeah, we've still got some information living in two places, I think,
like oracle stuff, had it's own wiki page in GEOS, and was also ported
as part of docbook -> GEOSDOC

Chris

Chris Holmes wrote:

>So I'm thinking about the GEOS vs. GEOSDOC split. Right now it
seems a
>bit silly, since most everything probably should go in GEOSDOC. But
>I'm thinking that GEOS should turn into basically a community and
>planning site. We have the RnD section now, which I don't think
should
>belong in the documentation. But I'm thinking we can eventually
have
>like a 'marketing' sort of RnD section, where people can share ideas
of
>how to spread the word about GeoServer. And we can also put more
>dynamic stuff in the GEOS section, like the How to Help stuff.
Pages
>of open and easy JIRA bugs, sections of GEOSDOC that need work. And
I
>think we could also start a more detailed blog - we can have
geoserver
>announce blog, with the stuff on it now. But also more of a
technical
>blog, detailing what people are working on each week - when you
finish
>a feature like shapefile output, then you'd blog it. All that kind
of
>stuff would be on GEOS, and GEOSDOC would be the more static stuff.
>
>Also nice job on the page about getting running with eclipse, Brent.
I
>put a link to the source code page (and ported it to GEOSDOC,
leaving
>an include on the GEOS one, which we should eventually deprecate).
>It's places like that where I'm wondering about includes vs. links.
We
>also could investigate the 'excerpt' tag, where you can put a
summary
>of the page. If we did it well tutorials could just be a collection
of
>excerpts, filling in the holes, and then have links to the full page
>for those needing more explanations.
>
>thoughts?
>
>Chris
>
>
>
>
>----------------------------------------------------------
>This mail sent through IMP: https://webmail.limegroup.com/
>
>
>

----------------------------------------------------------
This mail sent through IMP: https://webmail.limegroup.com/