Plasma and newcomers

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On February 14, 2010, Anne Wilson wrote:
> I've been mulling over for a while that fact that I have plenty of
> questions and few answers.  I wonder if what is required is a userbase
> page with a title something like 'Plasma First Look' (Category:Getting
> Started), dealing with such topics as which things are configured from
> context menus and which things need systemsettings?  Simple things need

you are envisioning something that would cover the whole of Plasma Desktop, 
then (plasma-desktop + kwin + system settings + sysguard + krunner)? that'd be 
good imho, as would (eventually) something similar to Plasma Netbook. 
addressing the whole desktop/netbook shell as one big thing to the user is a 
good step away from presenting documentation in a technical manner ("here's 
kwin manual, now here's the control panel manual...") and towards a more "what 
the user actually perceives" approach ("here's the manual for your desktop..")

> Einar does a good job of keeping the main Plasma page up to date, and there
> are good animated gifs in the Plasma how-to page.  Perhaps someone could
> put a note on the discussion page when particular things need to be added
> to any of the Plasma pages?

this sounds like it will be easy to miss. what would work better for me, 
though others may have different ideas to offer, is to have something a bit 
more proactive where the people/person maintaining the Plasma pages gets 
together with the Plasma developers on a regular basis (perhaps on IRC, though 
other venues could work as well) to discuss what's there now and what's 
missing.

that would prevent us developers from being "too busy" or simply forgetting to 
add to the discussion page and leaving the documenter with nothing to work 
with. it would also be nice, i think, if the documenter didn't feel like an 
outsider peering in :) maybe they should visit us at an upcoming Tokamak or at 
Akademy as well ...

there are a number of good things on http://userbase.kde.org/Plasma already as 
well as things that could be improved on. we can work on making it better 
together. can we start by scheduling a real time meeting on irc?

this also raises new questions for me as to "what is plasma.kde.org for?", but 
that's my challenge to address :)
 
-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
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KDE core developer sponsored by Qt Development Frameworks