[pmwiki-users] Re: PmWiki docs - audiences (Was: suggested organizing ..

[chr at home.se]

On Tue, 26 Jul 2005, Neil Herber wrote:

> At 2005-07-26  09:34 PM +0200, chr at home.se is rumored to have said:
> >Sounds like a very good idea IMHO. What do you think of creating separate
> >trails for these users?
> 
> The only problem with trails is that they do not give you any context.
> For example, there might be 10 items on the new user trail, but the new
> user can't see what they are without traversing the trail. An index page
> could show all 10 items on the trail and give short explanations of
> each.

Um... won't the trail index page tell the person what each page in the 
trail contains?  As for automatically getting these descriptions into the 
trail index, see my stuff about "teasers".

> Trails strike me as the "magnetic tape" of the indexing world - great if 
> you are trying to follow a subject in a suggested order, a pain if you want 
> random access.

Hmm. Still confused... what's wrong with first clicking on the trail index 
page before going to some other page?

Having said that, these days I tend to put the "trails" in the sidebars. 
Maybe we really need some way of placing different trails there 
dynamically? 

> Having just authors and admins does not allow for the wide differences in 
> ability or interest of each audience. I felt that 4 audiences was a 
> manageable number. Any more and you end up with the topics so finely 
> divided that some are only of interest to one person. It also make is too 
> difficult to classify an item, and we want to favor the authors who are 
> writing the docs by making the audience selection as easy as possible.

Well, I don't think there's a problem with saying that a certain page
and/or section is suitable for both new users and administrators?

/Christian

-- 
Christian Ridderström, +46-8-768 39 44               http://www.md.kth.se/~chr