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  • From: "Jeremy Blosser (emrys)" <jblosser-smgl AT firinn.org>
  • To: sm-discuss AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [SM-Discuss] Questions About Drupal Functionality and Acceptance
  • Date: Fri, 21 Oct 2005 16:53:19 -0500

I'm bumping this back to the list to restart this discussion in the context
of getting our site back up and running. There were responses already
given to some of these; those can be viewed in the archives around here:

https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/sm-discuss/2005-September/thread.html#12520

But I particularly want to hear what feedback Adam has. Adam, hopefully
you have time to talk about this now as we're getting stuff restored, I
think it's highly relevant.

On Sep 27, Jeremy Blosser (emrys) [jblosser-smgl AT firinn.org] wrote:
> One of the 1.0 targets was to "Install a CMS-type software to integrate the
> pieces to the Web site". This is done as far as installation goes;
> however, to be really considered complete I think we need to have the
> content from the Wiki moved over and available as well. Unfortunately the
> Drupal site appears to be having some issues with acceptance from the
> developers; the docs are being moved only slowly, and quite often people
> who are working on converting things are heard to complain that there are
> things about Drupal that they have issues with. I would like to start a
> thread here to ask some questions and hopefully get this all resolved.
> Note, I'm not asking these as someone with a particular technology agenda
> or because I want to denigrate anyone's work so far, I'm just interested in
> getting our developers into a site they find really useful. My hope is
> that the Tome team will have ready answers to all of these and time to
> implement them, and won't hate me for organizing the questions and asking
> them. Don't shoot the messenger. ;-P
>
> First questions, for my benefit since I wasn't necessarily around for all
> of this:
>
> 0) What about the old wiki was so fundamentally broken that we decided to
> switch to an entirely different technology? The main thing the people
> I've asked have told me is that the wiki had a spam problem, but it
> seems this could have been fixed inside the technology we had instead of
> implementing something so different it requires porting everything over.
>
> 1) I'm vaguely aware from parts of past conversations I saw that Drupal has
> some kind of wiki module available as an alternative to the book format.
> Depending on what this offers it could address several of the concerns
> I've heard raised, so can I ask why we decided against imeplementing it
> so far?
>
> Second set of "questions", these are some of the specific gripes I've heard
> raised about the Drupal site:
>
> There are several under the general idea it's too hard to add content.
> Specifically:
>
> 2) You have to have permissions as an editor. The wiki of course allowed
> anyone to edit, and this led to a spam problem. A common opinion
> however seems to be that the Drupal site goes too far the other way, and
> that anyone with a registered account should be able to edit pages.
>
> 3) The available page formatting options are either too slim or "full
> HTML". The filtered modes allow a very few HTML tags or BBCode. This
> mostly amounts to bold/em, lists, and font colors, as well as a couple
> other pre-formatted block modes. There is no provision for things like
> headers or other block elements. You can do full HTML to get
> everything, but consensus among many is that they don't know HTML and
> don't want to, and that the Wiki tagging was good for this.
>
> (On the flip side, as someone who knows HTML, I'm glad to have the full
> formatting option available; there were some things that weren't
> possible on the wiki for me.)
>
> 4) There is no real "hypertext" method for adding subpages. In a wiki you
> can basically just reference a page that doesn't exist yet and then go
> create it; subpages are created organically and the site grows
> naturally. With Drupal's books, to create a subpage you have to do
> 'create content' again and then find the page you just made in a drop
> down and make your page off of that. It's much more organized and also
> a good bit slower.
>
> (As someone with an information architecture background, organic site
> growth ala a wiki is horrid to me for actual user browsing, but I know
> it's the best way to get people actually contributing. Ideal would be a
> system where contributors could add content organically and then the IA
> could be cleaned up easily later.)
>
> 5) You can't get diffs between revisions of a book page. This is a big
> deal, since often we want to use the site to work out policy and
> technical design stuff. If we can't easily see how a document has
> changed through revisions then this format is quite simply useless for
> collaborative document editing, there's really no two ways about that.
>
> Then there are a couple things that are probably just how this site is
> implemented:
>
> 6) It's a good bit harder to find things on the new site. The old wiki
> index page had everything and was organized very well, especially for
> something that had content added organically. With the new site you
> basically need to ignore the navigation options and use the search to
> find things. I think this can be fixed with just some more time spent
> on the IA and navigation, but it needs to be addressed.
>
> 7) The style of the new site is more difficult to read. The content column
> and font sizes are significantly smaller, there's a lot of excessive
> whitespace, stuff scrolls horizontally a lot more and less evenly, etc.
> As someone noted before, compare
> http://wiki.sourcemage.org/index.php?page=The+Source+Mage+Developers
> to
> http://www.sourcemage.org/developers
> for plain readability, there's really no contest. Several people have
> said they've tried to use the code blocks on the new site and just given
> up on them because they are overformatted. Fortunately all of this can
> probably be resolved by just simplifying the style sheet(s) we're using,
> perhaps using the old wiki default style as a guide.
>
> Last questions, to get some resolution to these:
>
> 8) Are any of these resolvable in Drupal now, using additional modules or
> configuration, etc.? Which?
>
> 9) For those that aren't, what do we do?
>
> 10) Does the Tome team currently have time to work on these?

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