On Tue, 2006-07-04 at 05:48 +1300, Jay Parlar wrote: > On 7/4/06, Iain Duncan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > What about a Django wiki for tutorial type things? Gentoo has one that > > has been enormously useful to me and could serve well as a model. > > > > There already is one: > http://code.djangoproject.com/wiki > > Doesn't contain many full tutorials though.
As a definite contributor to this lack of wiki content, here's my perspective... Wiki editing is *such* a painful process for full-length and multi-stage articles. A web browser does not make a very good editor; when I want to save an interim version, it is more useful if it is instant, not the 10 - 30 second round trip time I get to a Wiki server, to pick on example. Because of the differences between wiki syntaxes (sadly), even writing something offline and cutting and pasting takes a lot of effort. For short pieces and things that can benefit heavily from community editing, it's great. But for tutorial like articles, I am not a fan of the wiki structure as an author. I am continually impressed by some of the work that projects like Blender do with practically full-length books in a wiki because it shows real dedication to the cause. As a consumer, it doesn't make too much of a difference to me either way, although the lack of downloadable -- for offline or bandwidth-saving work -- or sensibly printable versions is sometimes annoying (and I have no credibility here, since my weblog's printable view is nauseating at the moment). What I do intend to do fairly shortly is create an external documentation page in the wiki with links and short descriptions to a bunch of things that appear that are being continually referenced. This is along the lines of some of the documentation organising that James brought up in a django-developers thread last month (essentially being clearer about "introductory/tutorial" vs "reference" vs "internal"). Some of these external tips and tricks will eventually make it into the core documentation, I think (off the top of my head, I can think of content types, signals and user profile stuff). I don't think Wikis are evil or even a bad idea for Django, but there are some downsides to authors of longer works. Of course, there are some upsides as well: one of my more popular tutorials to date already can be done slightly better because of some changes that went in last week. I'm not about to go back and edit the article yet, but I might one day transfer it to the Wiki in a rewritten format if it continues to remain useful. Regards, Malcolm --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django users" group. To post to this group, send email to django-users@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/django-users -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
