Openkore ToDo

[Cozzie]

http://www.openkore.com/wiki/index.php/OpenKore_Todo

this is the openkore todo and I will make it totally comprehensive so as it would be the first stop for todo information. So please link up whatever it is appropriate from commits list to manual updates. I will be updating my own list there soon.

[ponty]

For the TODO point on a new web application for maintaining the manual, I think the current application MediaWiki is good software for maintaining the manual.

It just needs a major update to the current release, since the latest version has greater support for translations.

Current version of the MediaWiki is 1.8.3 (r5508) and here are the release notes from then till now found on their MediaWiki wiki page. You will find that there are quite some considerable improvements to the current one we're using.

[Bibian]

i dont know about you, but im not merging our version with the latest media wiki... VCL tells me he added a number of mods that are required for quite a bit of articles...

You would have to merge the 2 codebases and then fix all conflicts, takes too much time imo

[Cozzie]

it should be done somehow, conditions now isnt that good. Perhaps could ask him what mods he has added.

[sli]

i dont know about you, but im not merging our version with the latest media wiki... VCL tells me he added a number of mods that are required for quite a bit of articles...

You would have to merge the 2 codebases and then fix all conflicts, takes too much time imo

Care to give some examples? I haven't seen anything that a vanilla MediaWiki can't do in some way, or can't be replaced with a MediaWiki feature of some kind. Keep in mind a much forgotten mantra of the programmer: if you can't give examples, then it's not needed.

[ponty]

I suggest just installing a latest fresh copy of mediaWiki and migrate all the articles (our manual isn't too large yet...but the English articles will be the priority) over to the new wiki. Once we see how that turns out, we could add similar mods that VCL had in the old version. If you think it's too much of a hassle, I could just set up and mod a mediaWiki on a separate host for now, so you aren't doing everything. Once the article migration process into the new mediaWiki format is complete, I'll pass the files back to you guys to host as the main manual.

I really want this documentation of the Openkore manual to go global because we are probably losing a great amount of potential talented devs/users who do not communicate well or at all in English. It's good that Openkore has a Wiki and forums as useful resources, but I have a feeling that most users (excluding the lazy low level nub bunch) can't make use of that information because the volunteers who are interested in helping write the documents available to them are lacking to the following reasons:

• They do not know that they can contribute to the wiki in the first place (possibly let all the other language boards make a post about the need of documentation writers and somehow make it more attractive to follow through with contributing back to the community)
• They find that updating translations in the wiki not very user-friendly D: (e.g. editing links through different languages are a hassle and a localized link would save many redundant actions...)
• The idioms or similar literary devices in the main article makes it difficult to translate
• The documents are lacking a standard for translations (maybe we could just adopt wikipedia's standards)
• The increase of non-Anglophone users...English isn't taught in every country and the language will slowly lose dominance on the internet as more and more non-Anglophone countries have access to the internet so if the articles are available in another language they could translate from that would widen the pool of translators.
• There's probably other reasons I missed too...

So ya! I'm all for helping out migrating the old documents to a newer format.

[Cozzie]

I already installed mediaWiki with the same idea in mind. Then I realized it is surprisingly not that user friendly to administer.

[sli]

MediaWiki generally isn't user-friendly in any sense of the word (have you SEEN what they call an admin section?), and I still haven't seen any examples of VCL's mods in action.

There's also an inherent problem when mixing an English-speaking dev team with new devs that don't speak any English at all: code documentation. If I need to say any more than that, you should stop writing software.

[ponty]

There's also an inherent problem when mixing an English-speaking dev team with new devs that don't speak any English at all: code documentation. If I need to say any more than that, you should stop writing software.

I'm just curious, has there been any non-English-speaking dev on the Openkore project in the past? I would imagine there would be conflicts in the code documentation for sure, but at least there is the actual code in a language (in this case Perl) that both devs could relate to and understand. xD

I already installed mediaWiki with the same idea in mind. Then I realized it is surprisingly not that user friendly to administer.

Ya...so I checked out other alternatives that we could use at Wiki Engines.

TikiWiki and DokuWiki seem to satisfy our requirements that were mentioned in the ToDo objective. I think going with TikiWiki would be over doing it since all we need the wiki for is documentation and not all the additional stuff it offers. So my bid goes to DokuWiki, but note that DokuWiki does not use databases since it uses plain text files, which could be an advantage or disadvantage depending on the person...I personally don't have a preference.

If you find any better wikis for our purpose, mind posting it here? I wanna check them out as well

[sli]

Oh God, not TikiWiki. I tried it a while back, it was horrendous. It was easier to use than MediaWiki, but it was just.. ugh. It was just terrible. But then again I'm really, really picky about my software.