Wiki Maintenance

[Timbow]

Much needed discussion I think. Good. let me weigh in too, but first of all let me say the discussion should be bigger still. GetSimple works really, really well. It is a fine piece of kit and the developers are doing a cracking job, but the project overall is behind and lacking in many ways:

• The default themes are out of date, back and front end.
  
• The default content could be improved
  
• The GS.info site design seems good to me but much of the content is out of date.
  
• Press releases have never been done since the beginning.
  
• The whole 'route in' whereby users progress from taking a casual glance at GS, to looking in more detail, to spending half an hour trying it out, to beginning to learn to use it should be looked at and made smooth and easy. that applies to the site, the core program, the forum and the wiki.
  
• And the wiki? Yes it's really important to make it good, so back on topic for this thread these are my thoughts.
  

Yes, the dokuwiki software could work better. Really good contribution from datiswous. We have no auto linking. All the links need to be put in manually. At the moment you navigate the wiki by looking down the index page like you would a paper manual but you should be able to progress through categories, keywords and searches and with a bigger wiki you would have to.

The structure - The Primary division in the index is by User Level (casual, beginner, user, developer) and that is the best primary structure but we lack secondary underlying categories. I mean if you want info on say the CKEditor the wiki pages are scattered through all the main sections and there is no way of progressing through them. The dokuwiki manual says that pages should be arranged and categorised in a logical directory tree ('namespace' in wiki-speak), whereas our pages are not. I am not clear how useful it would be and reorganising them would break every internal link through the wiki and from the main site and from the forum and from the GS Backend and you wouldn't want to try to do it with ordinary editing rights.

We have to accept that the wiki will always be a version behind the program unless releases are delayed while the documentation is prepared which would be dumb in our case.

Really, really good to flag up items the developers think might need documenting. I haven't always known what has changed or where to look. Remember not every change needs documentation. I have deleted a lot of statements like 'New in 3.0 is the slightly different...'

Plugins - YES. I was answering an email query last week and explaining that at least half the difficulty in learning to use GS is learning your way around Extend and the several hundred plugins. I still don't know it myself. We cannot have a user guide for Extend so what is the best way to deal with this? I was thinking maybe we need a series of articles like

• Three ways to Blog with GS
  
• Images Sliders and Galleries in GS
  
• Getting feedback by emails and commenting in GS
  

We already have a couple like 'How to do SEO in GS' and 'Extra Security in GS'. I think they are useful.

Glossary, yes we have the beginning of one

FAQ - Excellent idea. Real FAQ (that are actually asked from time to time) please. I will start a thread to collect some.

Is there a case for splitting up the documentation? Into say

1. Learning GS
   
2. Reference
   

Got to go.