I've been mostly lurking, but would like to offer a few comments...

reST to HTML is very straightforward, the docutils pacage has an
rst2Html script to do exactly that (and it is just a few  lines of
code). Sphinx, as Yarko has pointed out, is a tool chain using reST
that adds better facilities for large, multi-section documents in
reST.

I think reST  (and Sphinx) would be a great choice for documentation.
Sphinx is pretty new, but I have used reST for a lot of in-house doc
and it is a very useable and maintainable markup language.

As for combining a wiki with reST, moinmoin and Trac have done this:
   http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de/HelpOnParsers/ReStructuredText
   http://bitten.edgewall.org/wiki/WikiRestructuredText

so it would certainly be possible to integrate with a web2py-based
wiki.

The only think I would say to keep in mind is this:  wikis and
structured (not reStructured) documentation are quite different in
intent, workflow & delivery, and although you can make the argument
that wiki pages would just become sections of the documentation the
reality is that this would take effort to keep the wiki itself quite
structured (not their natural state). I'm in favor of a wiki with reST
as its markup language. And I am in favor of using reST/Sphinx for
documentation. I'm not convinced (based on having done several doc &
wiki projects) that combining the two is ideal.

I think if you treat the documentation as a built deliverable with
reST source files, and handle contributions, revisions, etc through
source control. This makes it dead-simple to couple doc revisions with
the web2py source itself, something that is otherwise complicated if
you try to build doc with a live-wiki. I've not gone through every
one, but I think you'd find most if not all of the projects in
http://sphinx.pocoo.org/examples.html take this approach.

Having a wiki is still good.... it's great for code recipes and quick
doc on new features, news, areas that are rapidly changing, etc. But I
think having a dedicated set of sources for the documentation would
result in a better organized, more coherent set of final docs. And the
wiki can stil have links to HTML pages generated from the doc source.
I have yet to really see a project with wiki-based documentation that
did not seem somewhat scattered.

chris
--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups 
"web2py Web Framework" group.
To post to this group, send email to web2py@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to 
web2py+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com
For more options, visit this group at 
http://groups.google.com/group/web2py?hl=en
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---

Reply via email to