Re: Getting started (going in circles)

Dear Brian

Thanks a lot for email. You are talking out of my heart. Please see my 
comments below.


Brian Topping wrote:

> Hi all,
>  
> I'm wondering what it takes to get started with Wyona.  I have to admit 
> to having tried to get it going in a half-hearted attempt about five 
> times now, and, well, I'm still without an operable instance on my 
> machine.  Sure, it's booted, but now what do I do?!?  I've seen the 
> Xopus demo, but that's running on their servers.  I want something that 
> I can put a JPDA debugger against and look at code!
>  
> The thing that keeps bringing me back to looking at Wyona is the 
> integration with Cocoon.  And I am starting to like Xopus more than I 
> like chocolate milk.  But these (with the exception of Cocoon and 
> chocolate milk) seem to be as elusive as the woman I would like to meet.

I know, it's still not really Open-Source. But believe me I am working 
on it. Kars (from Q42) and I will start integrating Xopus2.0 into Wyona 
within the next
couple of days, but again just our interface will be open-sourced for 
the time being.

>  
> What's more strange to me is I used to have a better understanding of 
> Wyona than I do now.  If the docs have been growing, they have been 
> getting less organized.  For instance, there are no documents called 
> "getting started", "quickstart", etc. that are available from the Wyona 
> home page.  There are no architectural documents with goofy block 
> diagrams or UML.  If I wanted to apply Wyona to my own project, I would 
> have to understand it through brute-force osmosis of what it is doing 
> on the sample sites. 


I think the best way is start asking everything you want to know (on the 
mailing list) and you will be aswered and then start documenting the 
answers and then
we will insert them into the documentation. (e.g. "getting started" etc).


>  
> CMS is not rocket science, but it's not really very efficient for all 
> of us to expend all this energy in parallel to evaluate it when we 
> could be using that energy to extend it and make it better.
>  
> What I have gathered is Wyona is a very simple concept that uses a very 
> small amount of code to pull off really cool stuff.  I was reading an 
> article by Stefano about the early days of Cocoon, it sounds similar.  
> What I ask is whether the success path of Cocoon could be emulated.  I 
> believe some of this has to do with documenting a reason that people 
> will want to contribute to the project.  Xopus makes things simply 
> unbelievable.  That it is so hard to get ahold of really breaks my 
> heart.


We want to start documenting Wyona by using Wyona itself. Please see my 
last email on DocBook and DITA, etc.

>  
> Documentation is not fun to generate.  I don't do it either.  But I am 
> not trying to get momentum around an open source project, so I don't 
> have to worry about it.  Wyona is, and I think the lack of elaboration 
> on the vision and the architecture is really holding it back.  Given 
> the demand for a robust XML CMS and the success of projects like 
> MMBase, I can only imagine that the lack of shared vision is what is 
> messing up our plans. 
>  
> Could Wyona.org be published with Wyona?  What will it take to 
> bootstrap ourselves?  I see the power power of a CMS so content can be 
> contributed by anonymous authors and approved by gatekeepers 
> (editors).  With Xopus running, it would be a walk in the park to edit 
> content.  We should have the best documentation of any site going since 
> everyone becomes a contributor, right?


I think what we need is two "very generic" publications, where people 
just have to change the layout! That would be a

1) Discussion Forum Publication a la Slashdot
2) A generic frame (I don`t mean HTML frame) publication, where the 
frame (head, navigation, foot) is always the "same" (global) and
    the body is XHTML (we could use it for wyona.org, answer to your 
question above)

There are a lot of people who could apply these publications on their 
websites and all they have got to do is customizing the layout!
But we need help on that, which means you have to get your hands dirty.


>  
> Stefano and company met the other day to talk about CMS as well, I 
> wonder what they came up with?

When was that?

Thanks

Michael


>  
> Sorry if this has very low signal-to-noise...
>  
> Brian