Re: Tech Docs and Consultants

Greg,

> Call me a traditionalist, but how about the traditional cvs + "your
> favorite editor" approach? I don't think the techdocs section changes so
> often that we need fancy wiki / edit-from-the-web-on-the-fly sort of
> technology here. I also agree with Marc that there is no need to move it
> elsewhere right now. Let's just keep it simple, focus on the content, and
> add other things later.

Simple: Because people aren't contributing content because it's too much
work, both for the contributor and the TechDocs site administrator.

1) The majority of contributors to a Techdocs-style system will not have CVS
accounts, do not need CVS accounts, and some of them find CVS baffling and
confusing besides.
If someone e-mails you an article and you tell them, "Oh, this is very good,
why don't you sign up for a CVS account, just follow this 14-step guide and
wait 8 days for authorization," do you think that that article will get
posted?

2) Raw HTML editing of a decent length article takes as long as writing the
article itself, and I have yet to see a WYSWYG HTML editor which produced
output that could be cleanly incorporated into a CSS site framework without
extensive hand-tweaking.
The result of this is one of 3 things:
a) Some writers (like me) only contribute 1/2 as many articles because we
spend too much time tweaking our HTML.
b) Some writers contribute their articles to the admin as plain text, then
forcing the admin to spend 10 hours per week formatting articles for posting.
c) Some writers get discouraged by the long delay in posting, and give up on
contributing.

3) Except for the Guides pages, the tech for which is unfinished, the
structure of Techdocs does not allow multi-user collaboration or comments.

I *am* focusing on content, Greg. I want the focus of TechDocs to be
content, and for the technology (including CVS and HTML markup) to be
virtually invisible and take care of itself. The ONLY way to maximize
contributions is to make them as easy as possible to make.

Lord-on-a-pogo-stick, no wonder MySQL AB is beating our pants off in
community-building. MySQL.com doesn't require that a user have Stunnel, CVS,
and intermediate HTML skills before they can contribute even a paragraph to
the site! Justin has been trying to change this, and I want to finish that
change.

BTW, all of the above really goes for the advocacy site as well, except the
part about comments.

--
Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco