Martijn Dashorst wrote:
But how do we know what kind of documentation to write when we don't know what you are looking for?
I think part of the problem is that the documentation is not as easily found as I for one would like. For instance, from the front page of the Wicket site, if I want to find the New User's Guide, I would have to look at the Documentation section and decide that since nothing else looks likely, I'll check out the Wiki. There, in the documentation section, I'll find a link to the (quite incomplete) guide. As a new user, I don't care that the documentation is maintained in a wiki, and I might not want to go hunting through a wiki to find what I want. So just choosing to click that link is a leap of faith. Had there been a link from the front page to the New User's Guide, I wouldn't have hesitated to go to it.
Similarly, for quite some time, even though I'd looked at the wicket-examples often, I'd always gone in looking for something specific, and never even noticed that there was a good Component Reference. Once again, if this were linked to from the home page, it would be much quicker to find.
Or take the whole CVS issue. We all know that Sourceforge's CVS can get very annoying. I've been able to download the wicket-contrib modules that I know about, but I've never been able to get a comprehensive list of such modules. SF always tells me that the list is not available, but I've never found the whole list. Eelco's message in this thread is the longest list I've seen, and I doubt it's complete.
What I would prefer would be a Documentation page linked off the front page which contains and organizes links to all the known resources. But for now, the documentation menu lists only Vision, FAQ, Javadoc, Wiki, and Dependencies. Plus there is the getting started menu, which has Examples and Download. The FAQ is minimal (which might be a good thing.) Vision is interesting, but doesn't tell me anything about *how* to do anything. Javadoc is great once you're going, but isn't usually helpful in getting going. The examples are good, but there aren't many.
One specific example of my own process is that I needed to have a class with some markup and child classes with their own embedded markup. I didn't exactly want a border or a panel. It was only because I'd been reading this list and seen the phrase "markup inheritance" that I knew what to look for, and even then I found it with Google and not from any of the obvious documentation sources.
I eventually found my way with Google and this mailing list, but the process might have been much quicker if the New User's Guide were more complete, and if these other resources were easier to find. I'm hoping in the next several weeks to be able to contribute a little to these, but I am still too far from being an expert to be very sure of myself in any of this.
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