Thoughts for developer.gnome.org

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

Hi folks,

We discussed a reboot of developer.gnome.org at the hackfest
in Berlin. I'd like to make a (possibly crazy) suggestion
about how we can proceed with this. I talked to fredp about
half of this proposal on IRC.

1) Let's fill up developer with our documentation, built from
the code in library-web. Instead of a single library site with
user and developer docs, we put developer docs on developer and
user docs on library (maybe call it help.gnome.org instead).

We'd use the same code that's running library.gnome.org right
now, just with a different config file to only build what we
want on developer.

2) Let's get some content on developer that doesn't have to
be in a version-controlled Mallard or DocBook document. My
(possibly crazy) idea here is to put WordPress on developer,
and use some clever rewrite rules in Apache to serve some
pages with WP and the rest from the build content.

If this hybrid setup can't be made to work, then I'd instead
propose to put all the built developer docs on something like
dev.gnome.org, and have all non-document URLs on dev redirect
to developer, which would be a WP site.

This lets us continue writing most material in documents under
version control. They can be packages and installed just as
they are now.

But some material is just too lightweight for a document and
just doesn't fit into any existing documents. For example,
the devtools-install document in gnome-devel-docs. This is
important material, but it should live elsewhere.

Please reply with your thoughts on this. If we could pull
this off for 3.0, I think we'll knock the developer docs
story out of the park.

Thanks,
Shaun