Re: Tech Docs and Consultants

On Mon, 2003-04-14 at 14:12, Josh Berkus wrote:
> Robert,
>
> > whoa... what makes the techdocs guide tech unfinished? AFAIR Justin was
> > waiting on the switching of the techdocs site to a new VM, at which
> > point he was going to convert the whole site to the "guides" format. The
> > zwiki engine seems thorough enough for our use, and runs on postgresql,
> > so I don't see any reason to completely dump it.
>
> I was under the impression that Justin intended to add user authentication and
> methods to give some pages limited editing rights. For example, I wouldn't
> put any "adventures" articles up under the current authentication-free Zwiki
> structure; my articles are leading up to a PostgreSQL book, eventually, so
> they need a copyright statement and to be editable only by me.
>

I don't think this was anything more than clicking a few buttons on a
web page or at the most installing some sub packages. Surely he wasn't
going to be coding in these features.

> We definitely should keep the existing Zwiki for stuff like the GUI list. And
> I'd like to move the Book Reviews over to it.
>
> > Um.. what exactly is the process for contributing articles for their
> > site. Near as I can figure you send in an article and someone is *paid*
> > to convert it and put it on their site. I don't think we have the avenue
> > available to us.
>
> We don't? Dammit. ;->
>
> >
> > More to the point they're are probably beating the pants off of us on
> > this issue because they have consistent, professional direction for
> > their entire web presence. Other projects have achieved this, but we
> > haven't.
>
> Lords, I could tell you things about OpenOffice.org ... but I won't.
>
> > I think the target of advocacy is different, simply because you need a
> > more centralized message in place than what I think we're trying to
> > achieve with techdocs. Not that it doesn't need a lot of work...
>
> Just that Advocacy needs dynamic content that can be edited by a limited list
> of users with a minimum of technical sophistication. FOr example, we could
> really use a dynamic ticker of "postgresql in the news" that anyone on this
> list can submit to, without a CVS account ....
>

I'm going to avoid trying to fix advocacy until we get techdocs settled
down. AFAICS we need to know if the VM issues have been taken care of by
Marc, and if so then Justin needs to hook someone up with administrative
rights to the techdocs zwiki engine.

Robert Treat.