On Tue, Jan 27, 2009 at 11:02:04AM -0500, Jared Smith wrote:
> Ideally (like you say above), the CMS would be *the* place to author,
> edit, and render official documentation from the Fedora Docs team. The
> more I thought about it though, them more I'm starting to lean *away*
> from a CMS. Let me see if I can clearly articulate why.
Well, ideal in an ideal world. :)
> 1) Revision control. One of the things we'd like this CMS to do is to
> provide revision control. So far, as I haven't seen a CMS that handles
> revision control nearly as cleanly as either the wiki or using an SCM
> system such as Subversion or git.
>
> 2) Document creation and editing. Ideally, we'd have a wysiwyg editing
> tool in the CMS that would output perfectly valid DocBook. I don't see
> this happening any time soon. This means that whatever we create inside
> the CMS doesn't lend itself well to repurposing or to easy translation.
>
> 3) Translation. This is an area where most CMS systems do poorly as
> well. How would we make this work with a CMS system? Check in the
> primarly language version, along with the PO/POT files, and have the CMS
> render the translated versions? Again, I think our current workflow has
> a proven method that works, even if it's not highly automated.
I agree with you, and I think my clarifications still fall a half-step
short.
<vision role="Just Karsten's own opinion, YMMV, take with usual grain
of salt">
CMS doesn't handle revision control; that is for the upstream SCM on
fedorahosted.org
The Fedora Docs CMS is *not* for authoring content. The opposite is
probably true for a CMS used for other web properties
(www.fedoraproject.org.)
The Docs CMS is just a tool to put easy publishing in the hands of the
document writing teams.
Translation happens the same as always.
Document authoring continues as we've done -- some sourced in
wiki/sourced in fhosted.org => SCM => XML + PO => {HTML,PDF,RPM,TBZ,ZIP...}
The CMS should remove pain at the end of all the current processes
that are working fine. This pain is, "How do I publish and manage a
draft or final version of this document?"
</vision>
> To make a long story short, what if instead of concentrating on a CMS,
> we concentrate on a system to take our
> "created-in-the-wiki-converted-to-docbook-(and-optionally-translated)-and-rendered-to-HTML"
> documents and easily publish them on the web? In other words, let's
> not throw out our current system (with it's easy editing, working
> translations, and DocBook XML core). Let's just take the parts that
> are the roughest (which I'm presuming are the presentation parts)
> and fix those.
It's really the publishing parts that are the roughest, and, yep,
that's what the CMS is supposed to fix.
The CMS is going to have a tonne of tools that we ignore or don't care
about or one day discover and love. Combined with programming, we may
end up adding to our capabilities. I don't consider any of that to
be our primary or secondary concern for a while.
In other words, if the CMS' authoring tools are so great that people
want to use them, they do use them, and we have a ton of content in
the CMS that needs translation, etc. ... *that is a good thing.* That
is the kind of problem I'd prefer to solve.
> > Make things clearer? Muddier? Slightly filmy but clear enough to
> > drive?
>
> You certainly articulated the purposes of a CMS much more clearly than I
> could ever hope to. I'm just not sure I've caught the vision of why a
> CMS would be better than (most of) our current setup.
It's not better than the good parts, it's additive. It *only*
replaces this:
http://cvs.fedoraproject.org/viewvc/web/html/?root=fedora
- Karsten
--
Karsten 'quaid' Wade, Community Gardener
http://quaid.fedorapeople.org
AD0E0C41
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