[compiz] Looking for input

[Jeffrey Laramie]

> My apologies for making it sound it was personal about you. With "you" I
> actually wanted to refer to the forum thread that far :-)

Yeah, English is weird like that.

>
> Long story short, I think it's good that there are people who are
> interested in and ready to work on presenting Compiz to potential users in
> an appropriately graphical web site, as long as there's still a
> functioning place for collaboratively maintained documentation.

Agreed.

> If I'm to write documentation, I prefer wiki over plain text over html
> over wysiwyg over web-wysiwyg,

...and lots of coders still love their text based code editors. :-) I've been 
messing around with linux since RH 6.2 and it still amazes me how much 
diversity there is in the open source community and how passionate people are 
over their preferences.

> We must be comparing apples to oranges, web design to collaborative
> writing :-) You see the first one as a priority, I see the latter. It

Tuukka, I don't think our priorities are really that different, but I do think 
we are looking at the project from different angles and with different 
strategies. I agree with you that good documentation generated by the 
community is a high priority. In fact that's initially what I came here to do 
and it's something I'll continue to work on. But developing by collaborative 
writing takes time and a substantial community to be effective. Because there 
just aren't enough of us the site is developing very slowly and I feel like 
we're running out of time.

With a really nice site new visitors will feel confident that we know what 
we're doing and will be more likely to try compiz. Some of those that try 
will join the forum, some will contribute to the documentation, and a few may 
even become developers. We do it right and in a short time we've got the user 
base we need to develop the documentation and the developer base to turn out 
lots of quality plugins.

Unfortunately, if we don't make a good first impression visitors will click 
right past us, we won't build a user base and community, and documentation 
progress will continue to drag. In short I see web design as a priority not 
for it's own sake, but because it "primes the pump" for the project as a 
whole.

> might be that some CMS provides all the wiki features like MediaWiki but I
> doubt it.

The thread I referenced earlier is still active and we are looking for more 
information about the different CMSs to help us make a decision. If you think 
MediaWiki is up to to the job, by all means make your case for it pro and 
con. I have my prefences, but I also have an open mind and this decision 
should be made by consensus.

>
> The good thing in putting everything in the wiki is that there's just one
> system, it's uniform and everything is maintainable. I'd hope you can make
> the web design so that the CMS and its content appear as a thin shell
> around the wiki, they look uniform and it's easy to navigate between them.
> In case this proves unpractical, it's of course possible to make the CMS
> and the wiki separate, targetting as little overlap as possible (eg. user
> vs. developer content).

Indeed it should look uniform. Lets look at some candidates and see which 
works the best.

Jeff