Re: Fwd: Help document Plone's API

Martin Aspeli <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.comp.web.zope.plone.documentation
Message-ID <[email protected]>
Mikko Ohtamaa wrote:

> Also, Sphinx seems to be the upcoming de facto standard to document
> Python. I hope we don't have yet another case here of being
> unpythonic.

This misses the point. "Pythonic" is a word we use to talk about coding 
conventions. Applying it to documentation is silly.

We have a proven, feature rich content managed solution on plone.org 
that has existed much longer than Sphinx has. It has a review cycle. It 
is accessible to people like JoAnna and Veda that I'm sure will not be 
happy to manage our documentation via an svn client and an obscure plain 
text markup.

I'm not interested in a debate to displace that. I'm even less 
interested in fracturing our documentation into multiple sources that 
can't be easily cross-referenced, searched or integrated in terms of 
navigation and structure.

Rather than this vaguely posturing that some different technology may be 
better for producing the content, we should focus on the important part: 
the content itself. For better or worse, PHC is the documentation story 
on plone.org, and there is no clear path or consensus for using anything 
else. In the worst case, we'll end up with a half-arsed solution that 
no-one maintains, no-one knows where to access, and no-one knows how to 
integrate into plone.org. In the best case, we spend a ton of effort on 
technology that we could spend on content and still be no better off.

The document I'm talking about here will contain a lot of very small 
pages, each with maybe 2-10 lines of code pasted in. I'm not having a 
very hard time doing that with kupu at the moment for the Dexterity 
manual, so I'm sure we'll manage for this. :)

Martin

-- 
Author of `Professional Plone Development`, a book for developers who
want to work with Plone. See http://martinaspeli.net/plone-book


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