Re: Thoughts for developer.gnome.org

[Phil Bull <philbull gmail com>]

Hi Shaun,

On Wed, 2011-03-09 at 15:40 -0500, Shaun McCance wrote:
> 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.

This sounds like a great idea, but I worry about translation. I guess
that's not necessarily a priority for developer docs, and it's better to
get some good material on there and worry about doing things "properly
properly" later on. We don't have much time, after all.

I'm guessing structure isn't too much of an issue, although much of the
structuring of the WP pages will have to be done manually, based on tags
for now. Is that the way it works?

As an aside, it would be a good idea to collect some ideas of what
developers will want to know in the transition to GNOME 3.0, so we can
write material around that. Some things are obvious, but not all.

Thanks,

Phil

-- 
Phil Bull
https://launchpad.net/~philbull
Book - http://nostarch.com/ubuntu4.htm