Public SourceMage Discussion List

["Jeremy Blosser (emrys)" <jblosser-smgl AT firinn.org>]

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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