19 May
2017
19 May
'17
10:10 a.m.
On Fri, May 19, 2017 at 11:01 AM, Thomas Mortagne <thomas.mortagne(a)xwiki.com
wrote:
IMO maintaining outside of platform and out of sync an
application
that is supposed to help using it is going to be a nightmare. It's
pretty much impossible to have demo content in it for any feature more
recent that its minimum supported version.
I don't think we need to keep a low minimum supported version. We can
increase the platform version whenever we update the documentation, if it
is required.
>
> On Thu, May 18, 2017 at 5:15 PM, Vincent Massol <vincent(a)massol.net>
wrote:
> > Hi devs,
> >
> > We have 2 topics to decide:
> >
> > * Topic 1: Right now we have 2 help applications. We need to decide if
> we merge them or not.
> > * Topic 2: Decide if we keep the Help Center app in contrib or if we
> move it in platform.
> > * Topic 3: Decide if we fold the Sandbox into the Help Center
> > * Topic 4: Decide how we handle data created/modified by users when we
> upgrade or for newcomers.
> >
> > Re topic 1, my preference goes to having a single help application and
> fold what’s currently in the platform help app into the Help center.
> There’s no reason that knowing how to edit a page would be more or less
> core than knowing the syntax markup or the Tips Panel.
> >
> > Re topic 3, I don’t think that the sandbox app is really that useful as
> a standalone app and I would be for merging it into the Help application.
> >
> > Re topic 4, there are 2 issues I can think of:
> > - when new users come in, if the pages that are supposed to be modified
> (sandbox + the 2 bundled AWM apps) have been heavily modified, then
> newcomers won’t see the default content and could just be seeing defaced
> content.
> > - if the pages have been modified by the user + by the help app then on
> XWiki upgrade there’ll be conflicts.
> >
> > One idea for topic4 is to have the Help app spawn new pages (ie pages
> not bundled by the Help app itself) for users to try them out, by having
> some “try it out” button.
> >
> > Re topic 2, the issue with keeping the help center app outside of
> platform is that we need to support documentation for multiple versions of
> XWiki. For example, we modified the page menu in Xwiki 9.4 and there are
> over 10 screenshots to update. However users of XWiki 8.4 (for ex) can also
> install this app and if they get the new documentation, it won’t match what
> they see in their wiki. The same can be said with the new notification
> feature for example.
> >
> > The advantage of moving it in platform is that it’s in sync with the
> platform (ie less work) but we should only document platform features in
> it. It also means longer release times since it’s linked to the release of
> platform. Note that the rationale for having it in platform would be that
> platform help is a core feature.
> >
> > We could (and probably should) offer some places in the Help Center so
> that Extensions could plug their help. And we could probably refactor a bit
> the current content of the help center to move help for feature in the
> extension UI part of those extensions.
> >
> > Considering all aspects I think my preference goes to having it in
> platform since I don’t think we have the manpower to maintain doc for all
> versions of XWiki.
> >
> > WDYT?
> >
> > Thanks
> > -Vincent
> >
>
>
>
> --
> Thomas Mortagne
>