Re: [PHP-GTK] Status of PHP-GTK

Hi Steph,

Thanks for answering so fast. I beg to differ, though:

> Also, think 'branding'. php.net stuff should always clearly be php.net
> stuff.

Any halfway decent CMS should allow you to maintain the same user interface.
In the case of D., I clone the gtk.php.net theme for php-gtk.eu, although it
is not enabled to avoid such "branding" confusion, so it is clearly a
non-issue.

> Ugh... you don't need special skills to build the manual.

Anything more complicated than clicking on "edit", editing, then clicking on
"save", is "specialist" level these days, I'd say.

> The aim... yes there is an aim... is to have all php.net
> documentation work in the same way, using industry standard
> tools, so that someone who has written for the PHP-GTK Manual
> can easily transfer to the PHP Manual and vice versa.
> Outside of php.net, the skills acquired here are transferable
> to pretty much any major OSS project, and also to most
> technical authoring jobs.

This makes technical sense, of cours. However, "any major OSS project"
doesn't use PhD, or even Docbook. XHTML, for all its flaws, is pretty much
the standard when it comes to publishing for the web or for mobile. Not for
industry docs, of course, which is using Docbook or DITA anyway.

Seen from here, it feels un-community-like, more typical of a corporate
train of thought trying for openness, but refusing to take into account the
fact that the actual expectations from casual, non-professional users are
quite different and longing for a lower entry point. These can contribute
more entry-level docs than professional devs who have long forgotten what it
was like to be a newbie. We see this every day in D., where most of the
community doc and code outside core is actually done by new users on their
learning process, with help (on IRC) from the doc team, but without such a
"master plan".

> The 'lost wiki pages' were thrown out because the wiki was
> spammed mercilessly over a long period of time and there weren't
> enough hours in the day to contain it.

I cleaned up the pages from the spamming and hacking mess (the r57shell
trojan is in the php.net CVS !) it in late 2007 when I ported them D. too,
and although the site receives a few dozen attacks a day, it has never let
any come in since. Not that it couldn't happen, of course, but it seems to
resist fairly well for now.

> And the apps repo is old, old, old... it never went live after
> PHP-GTK 2 came out, so anything in there from our servers dates from v1.

Same for this: as you pobably know, I cleaned up this info too at the same
time, obtained lost pages from archive.org which weren't even in CVS, and
put them online again. New entries have been added by members over time, and
it is the most visited part of the site. So it *does* seem to work.

> I think, given the experience we had with the wiki, it would be very
> unlikely that Andrei would want to take the risk again on a Yahoo!
> server carrying a whole bunch of php.net sites.

The wiki was apparently not kept up-to-date patch-wise, which means once
intruders noticed this, they were able to install r57shell and from here
do pretty much what they wanted. More recent versions of pbWki, which you
used then, are considerably more resilient, and also would have been at the
time if updates had been applied.

But anyway, does gtk.php.net, being a fairly minor part of the PHP
universe both for Y. and Z., need to be kept on a Y. server, if this
worries Andrei ?

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Steph" <[email protected]>
To: "fgm" <[email protected]>
Cc: <[email protected]>
Sent: Thursday, April 16, 2009 12:02 PM
Subject: Re: [PHP-GTK] Status of PHP-GTK



FGM wrote:
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