[TYPO3-english] beginner to plugin development

[Erik Svendsen]

bernd wilke skrev:
> Am Tue, 16 Feb 2010 22:52:44 +0100 schrieb Erik Svendsen:
> 
>> That's a problem in the TYPO3 world. Some important books are only in
>> German. Books on such fundamental new part as Extbase/Fluid should have
>> been published in English from day one. Not doing so are in my opinion
>> hurting TYPO3's potential outside certain countries.
>>
> 
> I don't think that you can blame the authors publishing a book in their 
> native language. Especially as these books are not from the assoziation 
> but from privat people.
> I think the problem is the poor (public) documentation inside of TYPO3 
> (and maybe of all open source projects)
> 

I don't blame the authors, I state a fact which I think in long term is 
hurting TYPO3 outside German speaking world. I also know that writing a 
book in a not native language depends a lot on the publisher and the 
support from them.

> The development is done by programmers, which are happy if their code in 
> the end runs without errors.
> Given so much time into coding there is no further time to document it 
> well. 
> And beside/after the volunteer work of coding they need to get money with 
> their usual work to live.
> As a programmer I'm used to neglect the documentation as there is no time 
> at the end of a project (kinky last changes are more important to 
> customers than documentation) and 'the next project is more important' 
> than documentation of the last one which is running.

I will cite from Dmitry's excellent book (hope he don't mind).
"Good documentation is a very good reason for people to use an 
extension. An excellent extension without documentation will lose to an 
average extension with a good manual. The reason is simple – people use 
the extension manual to know what an extension does, how it looks and 
what it needs to run. In other words, it is like a manual for most home 
appliances: "no manual – hard to operate"." (page 205)

> Be happy that at least any authors do a good documentation with these 
> books. I would like to support these authors and the community in 
> translating (parts of) these german books to english, but as I'm not an 
> native english speaker my translation is likely to bad to be useful.
> 

Why should you be happy for documentation that you can't read. Not the 
biggest problem for me, I manage to read German on a level where I 
understand the most important parts. But if you don't know a single word 
German, such documentation is of no value at all. It had been of more 
value to get half the documentation in a language you could read.

> As TYPO3 is used in germany a lot there are a lot of german people 
> working with TYPO3 and some few of them are able (and willing) to write 
> books. 
> 
> bernd

And maybe this is a problem with the TYPO3 Community (and the use of 
TYPO3). As I said, I don't blame the Authors, but I find the necessary 
to raise the question about publishing documentation on vital parts in 
German only. Authors should ask the question - "would it be better in 
the long turn for TYPO3 to publish a 90 % book in English, than 100 % in 
  German".

Regards

Erik