Re: What's New Pages

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Sun, 2010-03-07 at 18:48 +0100, Milo Casagrande wrote:
> 2010/3/4 Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>:
> > Hi folks,
> >
> > This is another half-baked idea in my brain.
> >
> > "What's New" pages are really nice to have in application help.
> > Users who love the program love to look at a succinct list of
> > cool new things they can do.  So let's do them, yeah?
> >
> > But how about we don't do them, and instead ask developers to
> > do them.  We'll put a page with a standard name (whatsnew.page)
> > in the help.  When the developers merge in cool new features,
> > they can just add a bullet point to this file.
> >
> > <item><p>You can now frobnicate files!</p></item>
> >
> > They'll forget sometimes, of course.   So at feature freeze we
> > send them a reminder to look at whatsnew.page and make sure it
> > has everything.
> >
> > Developers don't need to write the final content.  They'd just
> > provide basic bullet points.  We'll go through their bullet
> > points, decide if we have to write new help because of them
> > (we probably do), and then make the "What's New" page shiny.
> >
> > Does this sound like something we'd like to explore?
> 
> I like really like the idea to have a "news" kind of page for each application.
> 
> I've been thinking about this for a couple of days. Maybe it's just me
> being too cautious, but anyway, these are issues I thought we might
> face:
> - lack of doc people to take action in checking and shaping out that
> page (well... if we have *all* Gnome apps help written in Mallard)
> - possibility to forget to updated the page from release to release
> - possibility to have really too detalied/hacky/developer-oriented
> information on that page, in the end it will be
> - possibility to have a non-translated topic if information is
> collected and fixed late in the development

So here's an idea that could be useful for lots of pages where
we don't want to accidentally ship something unfinished.  We
can add a status marker to pages, say "future":

<revision status="incomplete future"/>

(I know, this is currently not valid Mallard.  But I'm planning
on making the status attribute more flexible.)

Then we modify our build tools to not install any pages that are
marked future.  People will want to know which pages are future
when previewing from the source directory, so we modify Yelp to
put some sort of banner at the top of these pages.

--
Shaun