Re: Proposal for building knowledgebase website.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Gevik babakhani [mailto:gevik(at)xs4all(dot)nl]
> Sent: 08 June 2005 21:16
> To: 'Magnus Hagander'; 'Josh Berkus';
> pgsql-www(at)postgresql(dot)org; Dave Page;
> xzilla(at)users(dot)sourceforge(dot)net; gmr(at)ehpg(dot)net; devrim(at)gunduz(dot)org
> Subject: RE: [pgsql-www] Proposal for building knowledgebase website.
>
> Okay I guess the discussion has taken life. This means that
> the whole idea
> of a good kb is important for all of us.
>
> In reply to the last couple of postings:
>
> - keeping the kb up to date and adding content would never
> work without the
> contribution of many who are worked hard to keep this great
> software as it
> is today. So I think a kb should be easy to use and administer yet
> manageable to the needs of the developers. I think having the
> WYSIWSG style
> editing component would benefit the most. I would like to see
> the kb in a
> way which any one who considers contributing would able to
> concentrate on
> contributing itself and not worrying about HTML and tags and other
> "unimportant" things. To that any contribution and writing
> should be review
> and validated before it can reach to the "public"

As I replied to Josh though, this is a secondary issue. Let's get
techdocs replaced first with a system *we* can use. We can bolt in some
sort of WYSIWYG editor/simple markup syntax later. In reality, it will
almost certainly be mainly us the maintains this - the majority of
submissions I see from people are from people we don't already know, and
not from people who are likely to have any access to add their own
content.

> - Regarding keeping everything in the same site:
> The way I imagine, I must agree with Magnus. Creating yet
> another sites
> means having more administrative responsibilities, this would result
> fragmenting the current consistency and make updates and
> upgrades more of
> pain than fun. Using the current framework and "borrowing"
> idea's from other
> sites is the way to go these days. You would agree with me to
> say that our
> future KB must be invented somewhere else on this planet.

Agreed, this is the way forward. The current framework is pretty complex
when you don't know the code though - when you're ready, start a new
thread and I'm sure Magnus and I can help you understand it.

> There is suggestions to use "tidy". I am going to check it also.
>
> - About the treeview. I have made some experiments with the
> treeview. After
> trying many of these components, I have been pointed to one
> called xtree.
> This is the best so far. It is dynamically loading and
> expanding. You do not
> need to generate all the tree-nodes at ones. After expanding
> some parent
> node the child nodes get dynamically downloaded and created.
> I have tested
> the tree with the current source files. As you might now, the
> current source
> tree is made of many files and sub directories. The xtree did
> not have any
> problem creating and loading of the nodes both in IE and
> FireFox. Netscape
> has to be tested yet.

Personally I have no problem with the treeview, however, in the UK we
have to ensure that site are accessible to everyone - we should ensure
that is the case for the KB as well imho. See
http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/ for details - we always go for
Double A or higher rating.

> - About the multilingual: I must agree with Josh. This is
> rather a sensitive
> point. I personally think you won't be able to translate all
> the kb content
> to different languages. Most of the time there would be no need yet
> translating everything would be overkill in functionality. We
> could make a
> survey to see how many people really have the NEED to read the kb in
> languages other than English.

We may not translate it all, however the existing site *can* be
translated, so the KB should be translatable as well. Shouldn't be too
hard - all the language negotiation code is already there - you'll just
need to be able to select pages based on a language ID as well as
filename.

Regards, Dave.