Using userbase for manuals

[Boudewijn Rempt]

On Sunday 01 July 2012 Jul, Eike Hein wrote:
> On 07/01/2012 07:02 AM, Boudewijn Rempt wrote:
> > After yesterday's discussion where David said that for frameworks/qt5 the help center invocation is actually one of the trickier things, I'm giving this out for consideration for other app developers...
> 
> Over at Konversation we've likewise struggled to keep our Docbook
> manual going: It's still among the better ones around, but we've
> been terribly lazy and let it rot, and if it hadn't been for
> Burkhard Lück showing it some love last year, it'd would probably
> be too outdated to use by now.
> 
> At the same time we're doing reasonably well at maintaining our
> Userbase presence. We used to have our own MediaWiki installation
> but migrated everything to Userbase last year, and I wrote some
> software that sends report mails to our development mailing list
> highlighting changes and new pages so we can review them and make
> sure the quality stays high.

I want that! I _so_ want that, too!

> Newly written documentation is now usually added to the wiki,
> not the manual, e.g. I wrote this this month:
> http://userbase.kde.org/Konversation/Configuring_SASL_authentication
> 
> I can't really put my finger on it, but somehow it's just more
> convenient and enoyable to do it in the wiki. It gets you easy
> preview, makes collaboration easier, and somehow it feels like
> a more appropriate place for topic-focused guides than the book-
> structured Docbook manual. At the same time topic-focussed guides
> seem to be the best fit for us, because being an IRC client our
> helpdesk naturally is the IRC channel and handing out links that
> answer a particular question comprehensively works very well
> there.

Plus, the wiki allows lots of extra stuff, like embedded video, links and so on. 



> Ultimately Albert isn't wrong with his concern, but the reality
> seems to be that we just can't get our act together on the
> offline documentation while maintaining the wiki comes a lot
> easier to us. And it's better to have wiki documentation than
> no good documentation, IMHO.
=

-- 
Boudewijn Rempt
http://www.valdyas.org, http://www.krita.org, http://www.boudewijnrempt.nl