Tuesday 13 January 2004 9:18:43 am
Balazs, thanks for your response. You say:
> It's not about job security, it's about time. It takes a
> lot of time to develop a product like eZ publish and it
> takes time to document it. However, we're getting > there... Regardless of the reason, documentation for a system such as eZp 3.3 is (IMHO) as important as the code itself. In twenty years managing software products, I have seen more products fail because of poor supporting infrastructure than inferior quality of code. I believe the challenge is not necessarily for eZ Systems: you guys have a company to run, and it's based on selling your services. It should be the users themselves who conduct a project like this. That's precisely why I was looking for a seed group of people to start working on it. Where eZ systems could help drastically would be in providing the ontology for the manuals (hey, since I am asking I would love to see it surfaced as topic maps). Once the ontology is defined, the outline for the manual is almost automatic. And from there on it's a matter of a small group of people, who HAS ACCESS to those that REALLY know about the code. It was my intent to start "feeling in the dark" to see if such a group could coalesce. I am a newbie in eZp, but that won't be for long :) Just a handful of gurus and we are in the race... I agree with you that we are not too far. I took the liberty of collecting all your documents, putting them in a couple of files, creating a table of contents and index, and feeding it to a desktop knowledge base, and found that if anything, some times there is TOO MUCH information about a given issue, often contradictory. But the resulting document lacks organization, and thus the user suffers by having to access it just by searching (just like your site). It's impossible to sit down by the fire, coffee/whatever in hand, and LEARN about a given subject. My invitation to you is to kick off the project. From the warm and supportive answers I have found in the community (even to my very stupid questions), I am sure there will emerge a core group of dedicated and knowledgeable people to fill in the skeleton.
Cheers ck
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