[Pmwiki-users] Re: Re: Main.SideBar

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud
Tue Feb 17 21:25:17 CST 2004


On Tue, Feb 17, 2004 at 09:58:28PM -0600, Jonathan Scott Duff wrote:
> 
> I disagree. It's easier to deal with things you can see than those you
> can't. If the sidebar is there by default and contains a link to the
> appropriate documentation for turning it off, then there will be less
> future surprise potential.  Plus for those that *want* a sidebar, they
> can plainly see that's it possible and easy.

And it'd be pretty easy to include (hidden) links in the SideBar that 
goes to the pages that say how to turn it off.  :-)

> Either way there's a big onus on the documentation to be complete and
> easy to navigate. 

I know, I've been writing a lot of documentation the past couple of days.  
I think that Dave Noonan's comment about "documenting what *can* be 
customized" is really at the heart of much of this, and I'm trying to 
find a good structure in which to present/document it.  Perhaps it's 
best done as a reorganization of the Cookbook, perhaps it's better 
done as a tutorial, perhaps a combination of these and other things,
but no matter what it's going to take some time to develop.

> There are enough new things that I'd almost advocate putting off 
> creating complete documentation for the 0.6 release so that the 
> saavy users can get their hands on it (feeling better about not 
> running a beta) and making the milestone for 0.7 to be documentation, 
> documentation, and more documentation.  

I reached a similar conclusion a couple of days ago, but given the 
frequency of new installations in the past couple of weeks I think 
that it *is* important that any documentation that exists doesn't 
lead new admins down the wrong paths.  So, I've been doing 
rudimentary documentation cleanups to prepare for the 0.6.0 release, 
expected within the next 24 hours.  0.7 probably won't be a documentation
release--instead the documentation will improve over a set of minor
releases as it always has.

At the moment I'm writing the "What's new and different in 0.6" document,
after that I'll need token pages about Internationalization and 
AuthorTracking and things should be ready to go for 0.6.0.

Pm



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