[Radiance-general] Radiance documentation organization

[Lars O. Grobe]

Hi,

once more the documentation thread, seams that Greg wants us to get 
something done before the end of the year ;-)

It is possible to enforce authentication in Wikis, while I doubt that 
ideas like access rights, user management and publishing workflow are 
Wikis' strengths. One the other hand, many of us are familiar with 
wiki-syntax, and if the idea is to get a platform where everyone can 
just start entering his ressources, this may be a solution. Actually, we 
already had such a Wiki for some time in the past, and Schorsch is 
maintaining a very useful lighting-wiki:

http://lightingwiki.com/FrontPage

I opted for a more (pre-)structured system, more in a classical content 
management way, with users, authors and editors, and with the 
possibility to generate offline-documentation. I have a 
demo-installation up and running at

http://radiance.free-architecture.org

The installation is based on Drupal (www.drupal.org) and allows 
authenticated users to create and edit content, while this has to be 
approved by editor users before being published. Drupal allows not only 
pdf-export, but also ex- and import of chapters of its 
"book"-document-type, allowing offline editing. For Radiance, I would 
like to enable two more features, cvs-access integrated in the content 
management (which would require to have the Drupal set-up and the 
cvs-repository on the same machine) and Tex-input, because Radiance 
documentation (and useage ;-) relies a lot on maths... For Tex, I would 
have to extend the space I rent from my provider a bit, and I would do 
so if I knew that there is interest in this.

Besides, there is a third option, a directory linking to external 
ressources, as Axel's webring project, which was an advanced 
keyword-based system.

Anyway, I just wanted to offer again others here to play around with the 
installation and also to maintain it for some time (I mean more then a 
year), given that there are one or two willing to do some editor-work 
like approving new registrations, reviewing the articles / contributions 
etc. If there is a decision for another kind of documentation, I will 
stop these efforts and try to contribute there. Anyway, I think we 
should take this decision in the not too far future, as all those small 
documentation projects eat up our time and ressources, and cause a lot 
of frustration if there is no visible success and acceptance.

BTW, IMHO we face not a technical or financial problem - we have to 
motivate people to spend their spare time on a project where they have 
to work together for free and not only for some weeks. That is why we 
have so many small projects and few working examples of large maintained 
sites...

CU and have a nice week-end!

Lars.