[TYPO3-mvc] Documentation

[Jochen Rau]

Hi Francois.

On 12.04.10 22:10, Francois Suter wrote:
>> BTW If you think we are writing a book to make a lot of bucks, read:
>>
>> http://oreilly.com/oreilly/author/ch03.html#royrate
>
> That makes me actually wonder why you decided to write a book at all
> rather than producing a free manual like the Core Docs. If it's not for
> the money, why then?

Simply because otherwise it would never happen. The publisher O'Reilly 
(and especially my reader) did a great job on motivating me to write 
this book (or better: my part of the book). We are getting a lot of high 
quality feedback.

> I don't want to offend either, but I was very surprised when I learned
> that the first official Extbase documentation was going to be a
> commercial book. That it should be in German, I can understand (but am
> still disappointed about), it's your mother tongue and it's certainly
> easier to write in that language, although from all I could read, both
> Sebastian and you are very proficient with English. But why commercial?
> I didn't expect you to do that for the money, because I know that
> there's not much money to be made from computer books at all, but then
> why deprive the community of a free, English manual?

I am surprised that you see the book as "the first official Extbase 
documentation". It is neither the first piece of documentation written 
(see the wiki on forge), nor is it "official" in sense of "given by the 
TYPO3 Association".

If I browse to the documentation section on typo3.org, the first thing 
catching my eye is the "official TYPO3 commercial book". It was first 
published in 2004 by OpenSourcePress -- in German. One year later it was 
available in English (and that is the status the link is pointing to).

Did Werner Altmann, René Fritz, and Daniel Hinderink write that book to 
make a lot of money? I don't think so. For fun? We'll have to ask them.

Ok. Let's browse for some official documentation of pibase. Keep in mind 
that the initial commit of the traditional tslib_pibase was on October, 
3rd 2003. That's what I have found on typo3.org:

http://wiki.typo3.org/index.php/Extension_Developers_Guide
http://typo3.org/documentation/document-library/core-documentation/doc_core_api/4.3.0/view/2/1/

A good start but not really a comprehensive manual (for example: I got a 
mail today from a user of one of my extensions. He asked me about how to 
configure the page browser of the extension (=pibase). Well, I sent him 
the php comment from above the function.)

Inline documentation? Nope. Just a todo list. I didn't try the TYPO3 
Snippets. It is "Forbidden".

(I don't want to offend you either. I know you did a tremendous job on 
improving the core doc.)

Extbase/Fluid was released 5 months ago and what I want to point out is, 
that there is a strange mindset of "delivery obligation" out there.

Hopefully, I was able to clarify my intentions.

Regards
Jochen