Hi Alex,
see my answers inline
Alex Thurgood wrote:
Yep, good idea. I take it the db would be hosted by Collabnet ?
Collabnet is a good choice. There may be other places, too.
c) There is a database running on the server. The community maintains
the database. When for example a Language Project has some new
documents, the respective links will be added to the database. There
might be a Wiki to simplify adding and editing the hyperlinks
together with meta information about visible text, language, version,
operating system. A script will update the database based on the Wiki
information.
This would be one way of making it IMHO easier for people to
contribute, plus have the added advantage of a document presentation
structure that could be inherent in the wiki front-end, so that at
least the help entered via the wiki would have more or less the same
'get up'.
in my first idea about the database and Wiki it looks like this:
the database has records like "help page ID", "OS", "language",
"version", "link to document"
the Wiki is only to enable everyone to add a new document to this
database, even without SQL and database access permissions. Just enter
the data to a Wiki, which is a skill most people already know, and then
a script will transfer the Wiki data to the database (may be after a
moderator has checked that the document is really an OOo Help document
of any value - but if it is not, then normal Wiki community social
control will remove an invalid link soon)
Database records:
"help page ID" can be the unique path and name of the guide file from
the installed OOo Help. Example "sharedguidekeyboard" for a link that
will be visible in the "See also..." section of the file
shared/guide/keyboard.xhp.
"OS" the operating system info seems to be valid for some help
documents, as for example the UNIX printer and fax and font guides which
are of no use to a Windows user.
"language" is the language of the linked document.
"link to document" is the full http address of the document. In some
cases this would not link to a document but to a Web page that the
submitter wants to be shown first, for example with a copyright
statement or an advertisement/promotional page. We should be open to
such a redirection, but of course this can be discussed.
Well, the French n-l doc project list has been pretty active already,
and there are quite a few docs that could be entered into the system.
However, I do wonder about selecting based on OS. Most of the problems
encountered are OS-agnostic. The only real differences occur with
things like installation, printing, fonts, and the like. As Sophie has
pointed out, we try where possible, to make our docs platform
independent or at least include relevant sections for each similar
family of OS. It would be a shame to have to split them all up again.
the proposed system should be flexible enough so that no one must split
up or change any document that already exists. And it is open to any
reasonable amount of additional documents that other users supply.
I take it that there will be some kind of flag system when you enter
the doc database that will enable you to set the search parameters you
are talking about ? Is this what you meant by metadata ?
the meta data comes into account when you do not use a link as stated
above, but when you just have a collection of Help documents all inside
one local folder.
In this case we need any index data to quickly determine to which OOo
Help page a certain document belongs.
As the user-supplied additional Help documents in that local folder can
be of any valid type (OpenDocument, PDF, HTML for example), it may take
too much time to read the meta data from inside the documents' info. We
would need one index file and a method to fill the data into this index
file. Or we must define a filename mapping of the data, so a document
with the name shared.guide.keyboard.all.US_en.odt in that folder can be
identified easy to be linked to the sharedguidekeyboard Help page, to be
valid for all operating systems, to be in US english language, and to be
of OpenDocument file type.
Alex
Kind regards
Uwe
--
[EMAIL PROTECTED] - Technical Writer
StarOffice - Sun Microsystems, Inc. - Hamburg, Germany
http://www.sun.com/staroffice
http://documentation.openoffice.org/
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