CMS Made Simple Forums

I am in the middle of creating a presentation for one of our customers which is more or less a workshop on CMSMS. Therefore I have begun to write down kind of a "How to ..." for the administration. While doing this I thought that it might be a good idea to join our forces and have a project group devoted to  documentation of CMSMS. While wishy has so many things on his TODO-list we should do the documentation on our own.

Here's how we could do it and - just by the way - create a "Best Practice" for CMSMS and show why people should use it. Let's setup a website for documentation. We could use some modules (faq, bookmarks, etc.) and internationalization and start documenting what we discuss here day by day. And even more. With this we could then easily create a PDF (maybe by using a module(hint hint)) or burn it on CD ... hey --- whatever.

Anybody willing and wanting to help? Any suggestions?

Regards,
Nils

I think this is a fabulous idea!

If people are interested in getting on board for this, let me know what you need.  I have a dedicated server and could easily host any services necessary.  It will definatly make 1.0 come quicker.

Count me in! I've actually been thinking about this already because I think documentation is vital for any good projcet. I'd definitely help and I would offer managing the "German section".

Wishy, you mentioned Plone in another post. Still an option? Could you host it?

About Plone:

• The Definitive Guide to Plone, by Andy McKay
• Plone Content Management Essentials, by Julie Meloni
• Building Websites with Plone, by Cameron Cooper
• Zope Bible, by Michael Bernstein and Scott Robertson
• http://www.plone.org/

I've tried setting it up in the past.  It's SOOO overly complicated that I gave up.

I could still do it, but I wouldn't be opposed to something else. 

This is soooo important for the project. There has been some discussion about the format of the documentation, but I think we can do a lot of the content work before we decide on that.

I suggest a sepearate discussion group in this forum for documentation where we can collect our ideas.

I'll try to provide some input too.

Jon

Wishy, you said that you could provide webspace for a documentation.
nils73 expressed the good idea of making it a reference project for CMSms AND a documentation at the same time. My recommendation would be:

• setting up a default CMSms install
• adding the people who want to contribute as users, determining one or two "supervisors" with complete permissions
• maybe setting up language-specific sub-sections (e.g. French and German)
• using ekBook oder gastbuch as some kind of open "sandbox" to collect proposals, hints, possible contributions...

The question is: Will we keep the TikiWiki or do we integrate the (little amount of) content into the documentation (which I would prefer)?

Good point, alex. Yesterday I went through a lot of communities for weblogs and CMS but they are all kind of messy. Most of them use a Wiki but some of them are already abandoned. Migrating the Wiki content to the Help-Page might be a good idea.

The crucial task will be to create a content / navigation structure that is usable and extendable at the same time. Personally I like jays idea of a separate discussion group / topic for the documentation project. Might even be a closed user group but that is just an idea.

Regards,
Nils

in my opinion we should set up an own wiki (not tikiwiki its so slow) for the documentation.
so it is very easy to set up a main site and all sub sites.
and every one can work on it discussion could be made on the discussion page which is available on every site.
this function is available in mediawiki form wikipedia.org

I don't see any advantage in using a wiki for documentation. It has to be set up once and then it must be modified throughout the process of developing CMSMS and its modules. Users can still contribute to the documentation (good old feedback forms) and the discussion ... erm ... wait, we have a forum. ;o)

Wikis are quite hip but they are not the final answer to the universe and everything (sorry Deepthought) and while we are talking about a software here, i.e. a great CMS, we should use this software. Or can you imagine Microsoft using Linux and Apache and recommending them to others by using them? It's not that I am completely against wikis but we should keep the focus on the product we are trying to "sell" even if we do not sell it for money.

Regards,
Nils

I agree on this.  Let's try doing it with CMSMS, though with the lack of multi language support, I imagine we're going to hit a hurdle at some point.  I'm also not totally sold on not opening it up to everyone, but it's worth a try.

After we get everything fleshed out, then we'll start converting it to docbook and put it in the svn repository.

Alright then! Wishy, would you prefer installing it yourself or passing this task on to somebody else?

I've already set it up and sent the details to nils.  I guess you guys can work it out amonst yourselves on how to proceed.

I also setup the Documentation section of the forum for you guys to use.

The discussion should now be done over here. I have set up a little vote for the beginning (which is just a trick so I have more time to scribble down some notes).

Regards,
Nils