Forum OpenACS Q&A: OACS course - webmaster's documentation

1: OACS course - webmaster's documentation

Posted by Rafael Calvo on 06/07/02 01:56 AM

Hi I am drafting an undergraduate course on Web application Frameworks for people studying e-business at the University of Sydney. The course will be delivered next year. Althought the course aims to be more general that OACS, OACS is a whole module, and the studnets will be required to do some project with OACS.
I have put together a first "template" (I don't even want to call it a draft) and would appreciate people's feedback.
What would you like to have in a webmaster's documentation?
BTW, I am writing it in docbook, and I haven't added all the images. I plan to have plenty of screen captures and some webcam animations, so it would be a "visual guide to OACS"

2: Response to OACS course - webmaster's documentation (response to 1)

Posted by Peter Alberer on 06/09/02 03:54 PM

Hi Rafael,

i think its great that you create such a documentation. I had some students in the last year working on openacs-projects and most of them needed quite a long time to learn about the system from the standard documentation. so i think the following things will definitely help people to understand acs: (things i did not see in your document yet)

webmasters things
- explanation of the server-config file
Developers things
- directory structure of a typical package
- explanation of the various file types in a package (tcl,adp,xql) and how those work together
- how to change the looks of a subsite with a new master.adp
- some simple graphs showing the core parts of the datamodell
- some simple interactions with the acs-api everyone needs (how to use the page contract,how to get the accessing user_id,query the db),

now that i wrote that i see that these are mostly topics relevant to developing new packages ...