Forum OpenACS Q&A: list of things to be improved on openacs.org

This thread shall become a list of issues that would improve
openacs.org.

I gave each item a priority that ranges from "1 = really important"
to "5 = we can wait a bit on that".

At the same time volunteers can come forward and tell the godfathers
(just kidding) what job they want to take over. This way we can avoid
that people work parallely on the same issue.

In the future we might use an improved sdm to create a roadmap which
lists all issues that want to be addressed by certain community
members.

Everybody could rank the priority of each individual issue and
comment on it. On the other hand Don, Ben or Roberto etc. could
comment on wether the issue is valid or simply stupid and not to be
realized on openacs. If it is valid, "DBR" could either assign some
volunteer to this job or do it themselves. Every valid issue would
get a deadline timestamp and everybody would be happy and anxiously
waiting for i.e. the new layout... (At least me 😊

These are my issues:

1. Nice layout for all openacs.org pages (priority 2)

2. Business style logo (priority 3)

3. A page that links to all available modules at openacs.org
(priority 2)

4. Populating each module with examples (priority 2)

5. Offering a link to the users documentation for every module.
Writing the users documentation for every module (priority 3)

6. Offering general-comments on all documentation pages (priority 2)

7. Activating Pascal's SDM patch (priority 3)

8. Activating the valuable patches at openacs.org/sdm (priority 3)

That's all I can think of now.

Feel free to express your own issues and priorities...

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2: Interactive docs (response to 1)
Posted by Sam Snow on
This goes with idea number 6. I don't think general comments is the best solution for the docs, but it is close...

See what I just wrote in this thread:  https://openacs.org/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=00025d&topic_id=11&topic=OpenACS

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Posted by David Kuczek on
I just checked out php.net and the interactive postgresql
documentation.

How do they differ from an openacs documentation with
activated general-comments on every doc page?

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Posted by Sam Snow on
The difference would be the mechanism for maintainers to easily review the comments and once they have been considered either update the documentation or not, and then delete the comment.

Comments should not be staying at the bottom of the page for a long period of time like they have in the PHP manual.

Maybe general comments is sufficient for this. I'm going to have to admit a lack of experience and ask if anyone else has an opinion....

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Posted by Carl Coryell-Martin on
I would Love a standard set of browseable docs that I could comment on. There have been so many times that I have wasted hours rooting around in the source code of a module because its documentation was lame and out of date. I even submitted a patch recently to address a particularly egregious flaw with the news module. But who knows how long it will be before that will be rolled into the current /docs, and how many other submissions have been made by other people that I might have benefited from?

Cheers,

Carl CM

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Posted by good bye on
General comments on the documentation pages, ala PHP.net
would be very valuable. It doesn't matter so much that old
comments hang around, as long as the date is marked.

I've had to work with PHP and found that the comments  for each
api function were extremely valuable. I know non-technical
people who have built systems in PHP and explicitly stated that
the user comments were _the_ most important part of PHP.net,
in terms of getting their project finished.

If anything, it saves a bboard search, or looking through a
separate piece of documentation.