RE: blueDonkey / Motorola Extensions

Noel Welsh wrote:
> The Motorola extensions seem like a good thing, though
> I'm a bit worried about it becoming too difficult for
> newbies to contribute.  I suspect it will actually
> seem a lot simpler for those who haven't gone through
> the various different conventions that we have.

From the newbie/casual contributor perspective, I see two main operations,
which should be made as easy as possible:

* adding a new recipe and linking it up to an existing section or chapter.
* editing or adding comments to existing material

I don't see any problem with making these operations easy.  I think the
existing approach seems fine, given instructions.  I started to write up
some more detailed instructions but found I needed to answer some questions
about the overall structure and TOC issues first.

> --- Anton van Straaten <[email protected]> wrote:
> > Some of the above should let us do what we need, but
> > at worst, we can always do some of our own processing
> > to tie all the content together for printing purposes.
> > There's enough markup in the pages that some scripts
> > to do this shouldn't be difficult.
>
> Agreed.  If we get enough content to worry about creating
> a book I'll be happy!

OK.  I'll take a look at the Motorola thing to see whether it helps without
complicating things too much, but other than that we'll stick to the current
approach.

When you get down to it, the main requirement for a printed book is a
contiguous list of all the topics that need to be pasted together to make up
the book; plus the ability to generate at least a top-level TOC for it all.
It's not a question of whether that's possible, it's more a question of
whether Twiki will do that in real time while serving pages - but of course
for a printed book, it doesn't need to.

Regarding other wiki books, I don't know of any.  But I'm not seeing any big
reason not to do it.  I don't know of anything that would meet the
requirements we've discussed any better.  I can *imagine* better things, but
to meet the collaborative requirement, they're all going to be pretty
wiki-like.

Anton



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