Mailing-List: contact docs-help@httpd.apache.org; run by ezmlm
Precedence: bulk
Reply-To: docs@httpd.apache.org
Received-SPF: neutral (nike.apache.org: local policy)
Message-ID: <4FA1BA92.40002@cord.dk>
Date: Thu, 03 May 2012 00:52:02 +0200
From: Daniel Gruno <rumble@cord.dk>
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64;
 rv:11.0) Gecko/20120327 Thunderbird/11.0.1
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: docs@httpd.apache.org
Subject: Re: Proposal to move docs to Apache CMS
References: <201204242006.24835@news.perlig.de>
 <201205022340.22467@news.perlig.de>
 <CAKDPwQZXr=rdx-razBCEOLLVSe3xrv03xjQOH=L+6zSQzDSD-w@mail.gmail.com>
 <201205030007.04364@news.perlig.de>
 <CAKDPwQZgWM64LPKr1W3s8iJdJ4pCbCD4Oeb_BUSWg13XcbGtQQ@mail.gmail.com>
 <4FA1B51F.3060206@cord.dk>
In-Reply-To: <4FA1B51F.3060206@cord.dk>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Clean slate here, because this is just some free thoughts:

I am for moving both the site and the documentation to the CMS system if
it indeed works as Tony explained. I'm also in favor of Noirin's
suggestion about making how to contribute to documentation clearer.

My train of thoughts as I start from the front page is:

1) Where can I contribute to documentation? I don't see it
2) I'm a newbie, what or who is SVN?
3) How do I write a patch or check out a repo? (I see a LOT of bugs on
the docs bugzilla where people obviously don't know what a patch is)
4) Okay, I wrote something - why doesn't it show? I need to rebuild?
5) What's XSLT, I just wanted to help with a translation?!
6) Will everything blow up when I commit something?
7) I can't make Java or Perl or insert-process-here work!

Apart from question 2, I had to ask all of those questions when I
started as a contributor and moved up as a committer, and if it weren't
for my enthusiasm, I would've stayed as a contributor and just mailed a
few patches here and there at best. So I think what Noirin pointed out
is actually something vital that's preventing people from contributing
more to our documentation that they could, adding more work for the rest
of us to do. I'm happy to do as much work as I can, but there have been
quite a few times where I have wanted to just tell Mr. X-y-z "Do A, B
and C and you're done in 2 minutes". And I think that using a CMS
system, we could at least cut down on all the steps that has to be taken
for people to add/edit our stuff.

Yes, they would still have to be committers or whatever, but the mere
process would be easy to overlook and friendly to new people, and I
think that alone would not alone make it less frightening to newcomers,
but also make it easier for us to encourage people to become
contributors or committers.

I hope half of that at least made sense.

With regards,
Daniel.

---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: docs-unsubscribe@httpd.apache.org
For additional commands, e-mail: docs-help@httpd.apache.org