[Mulgara-dev] documentation wiki

[thomas]

hi all,

i started working on transfering the documentation into a manageable state 
again. i already did a lot of search and replace (or destroy) to eliminate 
some idiosyncracies of the old html code. i also consolidated all the 
navigation files into one document, which is attached. if anybody feels 
inclined to check if some pages got lost during the process i would be very 
grateful. i don't know any way to check this automatically and since this 
is the backbone of the new site...


but i 've got a problem now that i'd like to discuss: as far as i can see 
the confluence wiki doesn't support a site layout with a navigation tree on 
every page (be it at the left, as usual, at the top, in a frame or anywhere 
else). i think that's a showstopper. the documentation is about 185 pages 
(if i counted correctly) and such a massive amount of text needs good 
navigational infrastructure. confluence can only provide an extra page with 
a list of available documents - sorted hierarchically, and that's it. if 
anybody knows of a way to produce such a navigational element please tell 
me! otherwise i would suggest to switch from confluence to daisy 
<http://cocoondev.org/daisy/index.html>.
i'm more reluctant than it may seem to push the daisy wiki since i don't 
really know it that much and i can understand that you don't like the idea 
of getting accustomed to yet another (rather unknown) wiki. but i really 
think the daisy wiki is better than the confluence wiki.

in addition to better support for navigation the daisy wiki also makes it 
easier to transfer the documentation via drag&drop because it provides an 
html-source-view. using the confluence wiki would mean that the html has to 
be converted to wiki syntax first. surely doable if you're good with regexp 
...

i don't want to suggest that the daisy wiki is better in every respect 
since it is not. one point where the confluence wiki is better is that it 
allows wiki like markup editing which daisy does not allow yet (it is 
planned, but who knows...). but on the other hand the daisy wiki has html 
source code editing and exactly that makes transfering the old 
documentation so much easier. and it has a decent link editor which makes 
authoring inner-site-navigation quite easy. no one has to type in 
html-syntax or remember absolute paths. under the hood things are very 
flexible and much more powerfull than with confluence.
the wysiwyg-editors of daisy and confluence both suck in terms of speed, 
though: it takes a while until they come up.


i case you agree with me to switch to the daisy wiki i would of course also 
move all the wiki content that's aeerady in confluence to daisy. it makes 
no sense to have two wikis.

i have a daisy wiki installation on my server and if anybody want's to try 
it i can give you an account.


ciao
thomas


mailto:thomas at stray.net
http://stray.net



: accumulated wisdom
. early optimization is the root of many evil [donald e. knuth]
. if you've got a hammer every problem looks like a nail
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