[Libreoffice] LibreOffice WikiHelp

[Jan Holesovsky]

Hi Christian,

On 2010-11-25 at 22:24 +0100, Christian Lohmaier wrote:

> > Hm... how will the help be exported? What's easiest for you? MediaWiki, any
> > other interface?
> 
> The question is whether you want people to just read the content
> there, or whether you want people to update content. I'd say: provide
> only readonly access, maybe with a commenting feature, but keep the
> editing to pootle.

Let me actually take this to the ML, because this is a really good
question, and I probably did not explain much about the WikiHelp so far.

So first - what is WikiHelp?  It is going to be a help.libreoffice.org
site, where the LibreOffice help will be stored.  The intention is that
it will be a Wiki - because the Wiki concept and format is widely used
for information exchange, and because it is sooooo easy to edit and
improve.

For the first cut, it will be read-only, to debug the converter; I'll
announce it in a few days for feedback + testing.

In the long run [around LibreOffice final ;-)], we should allow editing
there when 'good enough', so that the wikihelp becomes the source of the
help for LibreOffice, instead of the xhp files.  I am still doing the
final experiments there, but the hope is that I'll get it to the state
where the developer can just commit code that should have some help,
provide a stub article, and the first time a user hits that, she/he can
update it with more information.  And the off-line (installed) help will
be generated from this wikihelp in the next releases.

Additionally, thanks to wiki being versioned, we will still be able to
merge changes from OOo.

> > I can imagine that getting the help files into a wiki
> > require some manual work, so we should chose the web interface that's
> > easiest for us to use. :-)
> 
> Simplest would probably just a small xstl conversion to html of the
> application help files.

The tooling is now written, just needs testing and polishing:

cd clone/help/helpcontent2
./help-to-wiki.py

And you'll see the current result in a wiki/ subdir.  Whoever interested
in this - patches appreciated! :-)

Regards,
Kendy