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[edit] Introduction

I have been involved a lot with the implementation of the so called "BlenderWiki" in the early stages. Although I have not been able to work much on it lately, I have been watching the changes and doing basic bureaucratic tasks and cleaning up... I have been thinking a lot about some problems surrounding the use of MediaWiki as a system to keep the manual up to date.

[edit] Problems

Here's a list of the most serious problems:

  • Page navigation is done in a bit of a primitive way, the implementation is very week, and it's not very flexible.
  • Internationalisation (i18n) is going very fast, and there's no sensible way to see which pages are out of date. This is probably the most difficult thing to overcome.
  • A system that allows to create dynamic hotkey templates, for example CTRLSKEY becomes an image of a "CTRL" and an "S" key.
  • Offline output formats. Several small projects and scripts are being used to create PDF and CHM, but it could be miles better when integrated well. Perhaps a wiki interpreter inside a blender help system?

[edit] Possible solutions

So my suggestion is to create a mediawiki add-on (or fork) that turns the current system into a better and more specific Manual tool. This would use the same syntax and everything we have now, but basically add some things to the interface - maybe even have two different interfaces, one that is clean from the wiki stuff (users-mode) and one that has all the editor tools (edit-mode).

  • All the navigation (flipping pages) should come from the mediawiki engine. This could be rule-based (when a page is in the index/table of contents, it gets a navigation bar on the top), or tag based, which basically works the other way around: when you add a navigation tag, it appears in the TOC.
  • Somehow, the international versions of the manual should be linked > that way, when the English page is updated, you could have an automatically generated message that states the English version of that specific page is more up to date when you are browsing another language (e.g. "This page contains newer information (3%) in the English manual"). Clicking on the percentage would then show the diff (for editors). This is just an example of how it could work of course... Also, every page would have an auto generated link to the foreign version, something that would require a lot of editorial work in the current system.
  • The hotkey template is trivial, but it looks much nicer :o)
  • People beg for a downloadable version of the manual, but more importantly, the system could be made in such a way that the output would be very useful for a printable version of the manual (which would be a bit of a nightmare to do currently).

--Ewout 17:21, 30 April 2006 (CEST)

[edit] Help us!

Of course this is not a very easy task, we need people to help us. If you have the time to do this, please get in touch. It's a good idea to join the bf-docboard mailinglist, and post a message introducing yourself and maybe tell about some aditional ideas. Alternatively, you could hop into drop into #blenderwiki on irc.freenode.net, but to keep track of who's interested it's probably better to use the mailinglist. Also, feel free to extend the list above.

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