Posted by
David E. Jones on
May 24, 2006; 6:42am
URL: http://ofbiz.116.s1.nabble.com/Dev-Documentation-Plans-tp168097.html
There have been some changes recently in the area of end-user documentation for OFBiz. Undersun has had a paid subscription site for a while and over the last 2 years has become fairly complete, but now the technical writer we had on contract is no longer working full-time on it due to other contracts that came up for him.
Others have put together some pretty good material as well, like the document Ian Gilbert did a while back and updated recently, and the really quite good set of documents that Si and his crew put together and that he announced recently and that can be downloaded from SourceForge in the Sequoia/OpEnTaps project's files.
Still, there hasn't been much collaboration in this area and so now is a good time to start...
The proposal that Andy and I have discussed is to open up the content on the Undersun doc site and invite others to merge in their content to create a central site with OFBiz documentation.
To facilitate this we have setup a Confluence server (thanks to Atlassian for the free license, and to Contegix for the hosting and helping to maintain it). Right now it is available here:
http://confluence.undersunconsulting.comWe will have it available on docs.ofbiz.org and confluence.ofbiz.org and wiki.ofbiz.org in the near future.
Confluence supports some nice things like public comments, PDF/Word/HTML export, good permission management, and many others.
Part of this "wiki" will be write restricted to a core group of content maintainers. Anyone will be able to view and comment on the content, but only a small group will be able to change it.
The other part of this site is a more traditional wiki which anyone with an account can add to or change, and thereby help maintain it.
We haven't decided for sure on this second part yet, mainly because we appreciate what Integral has done over the years with hosting and helping to maintain the official OFBiz wiki. Now that we are moving the managed documentation to this wiki it would be nice to have the more "open" stuff on the same site for searching and cross-linking purposes. So, I hereby request feedback on this and if the community wants it, we'll see if we can move the current wiki content over.
Now for the fun part: I spent a few hours today playing with the Confluence site and moving some content over from the Undersun doc site. This page is a good one to look at that I have started to do some formatting on, and that has a good mix of images and text:
http://confluence.undersunconsulting.com/x/PwThe trick here is that there is a LOT of content to move over from the Undersun content server. I'd like to see this all moved over soon, but it will take quite a few man-hours to do so. In other words, as usual I'm asking for help with this part of the effort! I'll setup accounts without much question for anyone that has contributed to OFBiz enough to be known and trusted. For anyone else, if you have documentation experience and sufficient knowledge of OFBiz we'd love your help!
For anyone looking into the Undersun doc site: you'll notice now that it is no longer possible to purchase a subscription there. I could make the 1 month subscription available again for the $4.95 or something if there is enough demand for it (as I don't want to manually add accounts...), but would prefer that we get the content moved over ASAP...
-David
_______________________________________________
Dev mailing list
[hidden email]
http://lists.ofbiz.org/mailman/listinfo/dev