[Typo3-dev] ExtDev Guide, Articles and Tutorials (was: Extension Developers Guide TOC)

[Robert Lemke]

Hey folks,

(sorry, for some sad reason I couldn't follow the thread the last days,
but now ...)

On Fri, 2004-05-14 at 23:19, Sebastian Kurfuerst wrote:
> I think that at first we will give write access to everybody as it is at 
> the moment. At a certain point, however, we should revise the 
> documentation in this wiki and use the wiki data to write an openoffice 
> document for typo3.org which will be revised before it is put on typo3.org
> If all-write-access is bad, we'll soon figure this out. At the 
> beginning, however, we need at first some content.

That looks like a good so far. But there are some points which need to
be changed or extended, like the system extensions chapter, because sys
extensions will have a different meaning in the future, etc.

The next days I want to re-initiate the reviewing process which will
mainly focus on screening the candidates for the sys extensions (ie.
those extensions which will be delivered with the offical distribution
of TYPO3). I guess that this process will deliver some useful results
for some extension programming tutorials so I'll wait for that.

Another thing we might consider is not trying to build a huge document,
which easily could be a printed book, because it requires huge amount of
work until you finally release it, only to realize that it's out of date
already (ask Rene, Daniel and Werner, they don't do much more than
writing that book for months ...).

More realistic would be a document giving some general introduction to
extension programming which acts as a kind of lighthouse for navigating
through the different sources of documentation. For the details of
extension programming and / or core development I would prefer smaller
documents which include one or two topics with good examples.

That brings me to the different kinds of documentation I imagine:

We have:

   - The fully documented core sources,for me the main documentation ...
   - The core docs, mostly Inside TYPO3 which will be (or is?) published
     in an updated version.
   - Coding Guidelines
   - The references, as there are TSref and TSconfig
   - Some outdated tutorials: Backend Programming, TS by Example

We need:

   - Two (or more) major documents: Backend Extensions, Frontend 
     Extensions, xxx. Explaining the basic concepts for creating
     such extensions.
   - Specialized small tutorials including code snippets and case
     studies. They could actually be articles on typo3.org like 
     the articles [1] and tutorials [2] on zend.com

The big advantages of articles and tutorials is that they much more
flexible to handle. One example could be a basic frontend plugin
tutorial, or an article about how to make your plugin cacheable and
searcheable for the indexed search including etc.

If you like the idea, let's collect some most wanted topics. What would
beginners like to know? 

 - Kickstarter wizard: A guided tour through the code being generated
 - Implementing links in frontend plugins: The right way
 - Using the cObj: How to parse and render TypoScript in your plugin
 - Backend Modules: Creating a basic module for managing your cd
   collection

I volunteer for creating the basic setup we'd need on typo3.org for
showing articles and tutorials (some things will have to be done by
Kasper but I'll make him some coffee while he's doing that ...).

So what about the wiki? I have to admit I'm not really used to working
with wikis but I see the reason for trying it anyways. Let's collect the
ideas for articles, tutorials and the TOCs for the big documents in the
wiki.

What do you think?

[1] http://www.zend.com/zend/art/index.php
[2] http://www.zend.com/zend/tut/index.php

-- 
robert

"They placed me on this earth without a manual. 
 And I dare to say, I’m doing just fine without ;)"