[Typo3-typo3org] some thoughts on TDR (or documentation.typo3.org)

[Peter Kindström]

Hi,
> I have done a little research on the future doc repository and want to
> share some ideas. This is all rather loose ends but if there's interest
> and I'm not stepping on anyone's toes I could write a proposal as Robert
> has done for TER 2, only less elaborate probably...)

I would like to see a proposal. It could be a complement to my
general proposal for all documentation, that I am writing on
this summer.


> 1. Basic file format
I don´t know much about this. The only additional request I have
is that it should be able to export the format to more than PDF.


> 2. Document input
> OOWriter-Files are uploaded
> a) directly to docs.t3.org
> b) by extracting the file from /doc directory during extension upload
> (legacy feature)
> c) via some import structures for wiki-pages and timtaw. For this, we
> might offer a feature that converts a snapshot of the page content to an
>  OOWriter file (Robert says this is possible) that is then processed
> just as any other doc.

d) The docTeam should be able to update documents from some sort
of TDR backend. (In future I hope we have a docTeam that can
manage ALL documents and correct smaller typos, change
categories, add user comments etc).


> 3. Document processing
> When a doc is uploaded, meta-data is updated in the db (and/or the
> file?) Ideas for meta-data: author(s), title, version, categories,
> translations. dependencies (= required reading), related reading, ???
> 
> Then the file is stored in the filesystem, just like in TER with some
> hierarchy /docs/extensions/t/e/templavoila/manual.sxw
> Another question is the path and directories, i.e. would it be enough to
> have /docs/extensions/t/e/templavoila.sxw? Simple versioning could be
> implemented in a way that we use a symlink manual.sxw to manual_x.y.z so
> that the current version is always used but older versions are
> available... But this does not scale too well.

We should also think of building some sort of approval function
into TDR. So that some (some) documents either is not shown
until approved, or maybe shown as drafts until approved.
We don´t need this right now, but maybe (for some documents) in
the future...


> 4. Document output
I hope it will be possible to have more output formats in the
future - if we like. Right now I can think of plain text (for
PDAs/phones) and wiki text (different wikis).


/Peter Kindström