You are absolutly right Dimitry There are people who write lots of books that costs big money and are also available for (illegal) free downloads on several pages, but what about putting all the effort together to write a good documentation for all? Most of it is existing in those books! Only one person to coordinate the documentation is simply not working. Especially if it is a core developer which has lots of other things to do then reading and correcting the old or writing new documentations.
Also coders are mostly not the best Tutorial writers at all, as they often seem to fly on cloud 7 when you read their stuff. One possible way would be to publish extensions ONLY if there is a documentation and a tutorial. Same to core features. But I guess this would slow down the amount of extensions in TER rapidly - same to new features in core. Is there a documentation TEAM which means people who's ONLY responsibility would be to look and coordinate the documentation? Another solution would be that the Association writes and publishes THE TYPO3 Book instead of other companies. i.e. using the TYPO3 Extension pipeline would make it possible to publish and update an ONLINE PDF Version - Chapters could be written by several groups, make the newest updates available for Association Members only ;-). If you look to most of those other Books about TYPO3 they are doing no much other thing then repeating an "updated" version of the TYPO3 documentation. Try to get some support out of this either in help through these authors as they reproduce GPL or in monetairy value to support a real documentation for TYPO3. If you look a bit over the rim of our teacups we should see that many other open source projects are already going this way. The code is free, no problem and the documentation and support is available thru "PARTNERProgramms" and special Support. If we want to get more people involved in using TYPO3 the documentation would be the A&O beside good modern and understandable code. Good code alone will help all those who write books for other companies. Good code and good documentation and keeping everything inside TYPO3 without Gallileo and all those BIG commercial companies would be much better - so lets thing about how we can get those authors working for TYPO3 Documentation. Take Christian Trabold, Joh Asenau, Alexander Ebner and Daniel Koch as the TYPOscript Cookbook Documentation Coordinators. Robert Meyer, Andreas Stoeckl and Josha Feth seem to have some basic skills which would be fine for a Beginners Tutorial. Thomas Koetter could help in getting everything into useful Video Tutorial Files. Kai Laborenz is a very good author and knows how to describe difficult things in easy and understandable and usable ways. He could build a Profi Team with Franz Ripfel Special Features like a shop could be managed by Andrea Herzog Kienast and Franz Holzinger - They wrote the ONLY real 5 Star Amazon TYPO3 Book! Most of the content of these books is modified and verified content from this mailinglist and its questions and solutions. Why don't the Association use this big resource Center for themselves and leave all the profitable aspects to Companies like Galileo Press, Open Source Press, Gabler,O'Reilly and all those other big publishers which books are actually OLD and overwholed in the moment they will be available to public. A Real TYPO3 Book - published online could be available always updated. You could even split this online Book into several smaller chapters or even pages which get updated and will be available for download in the moment they get updated. Simply Charge for this always actual ONLINE Book. By the way, most TYPO3 Books/Videos are about 2-3 weeks some even before available for (illegal) but free download thru those filesharers i.e. Emule and others. Writing and maintaining Tutorials for TYPO3 won't avoid this but would make the search for good valuable (but illegal) TYPO3 Resources a big problem as those documentations would be available in lots of updates very soon. Very sure people would then like to invest a little money on TYPO3.orgto receive always the newest version without this long search i.e. at Emule to receive the newest version of a document. Another big plus would be, that the whole documentation would be updated in ENGLISH and all developers who don't know German could much easier participate and join the TYPO3 Community. Think about all those who promote TYPO3 already in US, Eastern Europe, Russia, India, China, Australia and elsewhere, they are really thirsting for good documentation ;-) It would be nice to discuss this a bit more: If you would need people to translate the documentation into Thai and Chinese get back to us, we would be happy to help out and find somebody for this job. Andi _______________________________________________ TYPO3-english mailing list TYPO3-english@lists.netfielders.de http://lists.netfielders.de/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/typo3-english
