Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: Top Ten Priorities for OpenACS ... what are yours?

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Posted by Nima Mazloumi on
Hi everybody,

As a newbie - I think one aspect is most important for a growing and vivid community:

- a good documentation for admins, users, developers

And this is what OpenACS really needs to meet different groups and expectations. The first (for admins) to make OpenACS competitive with other platforms , that last (developers) to have enough contributors and maintainers for the platform. My suggestion is to have a steadily increasing Coding Best Practice Repository with lots of little articles on how to do this and that. This could be a starting point for folks who want to participate.

We could create such a repository by first consolidating existing contributions of  Philipp Greenspan, Joel Aufrecht, Reuven Lerner, Jade Rubick and the many others (if they are willing to contribute). Everybody should be able to post some little code on how to achieve something.

What do you think?

Greetings,
Nima

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Posted by Jade Rubick on
Nima, I think that is the plan, really.

When the openacs.org site is moved to OpenACS 5, we'll be able to use Dave's Wiki code. I personally plan on moving all of my articles and notes to the Openacs.org site (if the webmasters plan on putting up a Wiki -- I do believe that is the plan), and I'll also be active on organizing any content there. I think that will take us a quantum leap forward with developer-supplied documentation.

The documentation team does a great job, but making it that easy to contribute will greatly increase the amount of documenation available. And we can copy a lot of stuff into the Wiki, I think.

I can't agree more with Nima. If I have to choose _one thing_ that is absolutely important for OpenACS, it is good documentation. As a guy who programmed in Java before, I feel terribly frustrated that I can't find the right documentation for the problem I want to solve in oacs. Any serious open-source effort _needs_ to be well documented. As a person who is more comfortable with learning things by myself, I find it uncomfortable that I have to ask my senior colleagues for every small thing that I want to do. This has to change. If oacs has to be seen as 'developer-friendly', more tutorials, more thorough documentation has to be in place. I know it's asking for a lot, but if OpenACS needs to be taken seriously, I guess there is no other option.

Regards,
Vamsee.