[Typo3-doc] Wiki people: who's on board now?

[Alex Heizer]

Hi Robert,

Robert Lemke wrote:

>>BTW, it is nice to hear that someone at last understand the key
>>problems of T3doc and start to adress them in the right way!
>>
>>And if you continue discussing documentation issues in this list
>>(not in the US list) , you also may get more help from me and
>>others. Hint, hint!  :-)
>>    
>>
>
>That's great to hear ;-) I for my part will mostly listen when you discuss
>how documentation should be structure, written etc. and help you with the
>technical parts when neccessary.
>  
>
Thanks, Robert. In regards to the technical parts, and the rest, I 
contacted Ton Roosendaal of the Blender Foundation yesterday and got a 
very quick reply! They are using T3 for most of their site, except for 
some legacy sections, and he said: "BTW; I've only heard good stories 
about the typo3 documentation :)   Probably your choice for open office 
was a good one!"

Evidently the Blender Foundation had some problems with the DocBook 
format, which he attributed to the collaborative nature of their doc 
team. However, he pointed out that it has been used successfully by 
others, so how we use it may or may not determine whether we encounter 
the same problems. To wit:

"We had big difficulties with DocBook. Not only is the format design  
very clumsy and not user friendly (there seems to be still no good  
WYSIWYG editor for it), exporting it only has caused troubles...  
especially when the books are large (bug in pdf exporting forced us to  
do it in parts) and exporting for DTP design of real books failed too  
(no support for Adobe Indesign for example)."

They have found a wiki to be their best tool for collaborative writing, 
but then we had already agreed here that having a wiki-like interface 
for editing was something we wanted in our system. Fortunately, I think 
we may have some programmers hanging around who can give us a system 
with a wiki-like editing interface that saves to a standard document 
format that can be used and exported in other ways!  Hint, hint! :-) 
What are the technical limitations/benefits of the DocBook format that 
we may encounter? And how soluble are these limitations in regards to 
the software system we're considering?

>If you create a list of jobs, we could also create a news item for typo3.org
>for getting the right people. What do you think?
>
>Cheers,
>robert
>
Hey, any avenues we can exploit (oops, I mean *explore*!! ;) ) to get 
volunteers is a good thing! We have a couple of good writers on the US 
team. I think we still need to have reviewers who can go over all the 
existing information and organize what is there in terms of 
appropriateness for placement in the document structure. And, of course, 
technical people who can work on the system itself. I think things are 
moving very quickly in the group (good), and some of us are impatient 
(me), and momentum is easy to lose (bad), but there is a lot to do 
(good) and we have time on our side (good).

Alex