[documentation] Proposal for handbook maintenance automation

[Steven Peck]

On 8/9/07, Johan Forngren <johan at forngren.com> wrote:
> On 8/8/07, Steven Peck <sepeck at gmail.com> wrote:
> > The handbooks are a wiki for people with appropriate rights.  There
> > are 98 of these people currently.  http://drupal.org/node/109372
> >
> > <snip>
> >
> > Before moderation was taken out, I did in fact open the handbook up to
> > editing to a wider role.  The moderation behavior was very annoying
> > but the simple fact is page vandalism was worse then the above
> > statistic.
>
> How about letting anyone edit docu pages, the catch being that they have to
> be moderated by docu members? In that way it's easily for users to fix
> pages, and docu maintainers could easily accept/trash change with a click.
>

There is no moderation in core anymore.  The previous behavior
unpublished nodes that were edited.  People complained, filed issues
and ranted about how we were hiding content without notification and
began insinuating that we weren't an open project and that the elite
had special privileges.  I got hate mail.  It was a pretty irritating
time for me.

What I would have preferred and asked for, but no one worked, on was
new edits went into moderation while exiting content stayed published.
 This would allow a leisurely review made easier with the diff
modules.  Webchick had a patch that would do that, but was unable to
work on it.  I was unable to find anyone who was interested in working
on it.  Moderation was taken  out of 5.0.  We now have no moderation
in core, therefore no moderation on d.o.

Robert Douglas has a revisions tagging module, but this really sort of
abuses revisions.  It may be an avenue forward but has a weakness.
We're tied to the structure of where things are so what would a book
structure look like for a particular version if it worked at all?

For Drupal 6 the book module patch got in.  It doesn't change behavior
significantly but does update the technologies in book module.  That's
a plus but it means we're limited to existing formats for the most
part.  I work very hard with the existing tools we have.  Anything we
do has to be somewhat maintainable on Drupal.org.  Several years of
'would be nice' and 'it could be nice' have left me rather jaded about
would be neat stuff that nobody ever works on and / or never happens.

I'll try and get my other post out by Friday evening.  Working on a
demo of it now, just been sick all week.  It may be a more sustainable
approach that people like.

-Steven

> > On 8/8/07, Laura Scott <laura at pingv.com > wrote:
> > >
> > > On Aug 8, 2007, at 11:33 AM, Kieran Lal wrote:
> > > I think all the documentation should be a wiki.  Click here to edit.
> Give
> > > admins the ability to lock pages, were necessary.
> > >
> > > The current status of having 50 comments on a page for something as
> critical
> > > how to upgrade your module to the next API version, is completely
> > > unacceptable.  We are forcing companies and admins to spend collectively
> > > millions of dollars on upgrading their sites between versions with
> > > inconsistent and unclear documentation.
> > >
> > > Agree on this 100%.
> > >
> > > Something sepeck and I discussed at OSCMS was that all the versions are
> > > intermingled, and that ideally we would have handbook views by version
> > > number, and done in a way that avoids massive node duplication in order
> to
> > > effect hierarchy.
> > >
> > > The handbooks are a particularly tough challenge. Wonder if what we
> really
> > > need are tabbed views for each page, with each tab offering potentially
> > > version-specific info. Even in a wiki, that approach might be helpful
> from a
> > > usability standpoint. The tagging alone gets us part of the way there.
> > >
> > > Laura
> > >
> > >
> > > --
> > > Pending work:
> > > http://drupal.org/project/issues/documentation/
> > > List archives:
> > > http://lists.drupal.org/pipermail/documentation/
> > >
> > --
> > Pending work:
> http://drupal.org/project/issues/documentation/
> > List archives:
> http://lists.drupal.org/pipermail/documentation/
> >
>
>
>
> --
> Regards,
>   Johan Forngren :: http://johan.forngren.com/
> --
> Pending work:
> http://drupal.org/project/issues/documentation/
> List archives:
> http://lists.drupal.org/pipermail/documentation/
>