Re: Status of PHP-GTK

On Friday 17 April 2009 08:28:09 Justin Martin wrote: > I am quite well versed in PHP-GTK, > but I know next to nothing about the documentation system. This scenario is exactly what's got this list so active over the past few days. You're not the only one in this exact boat. Picking up YADL (Yet Another Documentation Language) is something that raises the bar to contribution considerably. It's a horrible choice: Red Pill or Blue Pill? Due to the PHP.net frameworks and tools that already exist, there is good reason to stick with their documentation format at the cost of making it considerably more difficult (less likely) for developers (such as Madeleine and myself) who write lots of PHP-GTK code but don't actually develop the code base itself to contribute documentation. I can't comment on the quality of these PHP tools, but I'm sure they are quite useful for administrators. But I am not likely to dive into source code and learn a new documentation markup language so that I can authoritatively document that you have to reference a child widget in a particular, non-standard way with widget XYZ. But that information is still very useful information to somebody using PHP- GTK! Would it be possible to embed an wiki into the documentation so that inaccurate or weak information can be simply deleted? (rather than just commented on, as in comments) This would provide basically three tiers of documentation on the same page: 1) The "root" documentation, in the tagged documentation format, edited only by language developers. 2) The "wiki" documentation, edited only by proven PHP-GTK developers who aren't necessarily up to #1 above, but have been given access to update the wiki-appended documentation, 3) Comments, contributed by end users. This isn't hard to set up since string manipulation is PHP's home turf, and I *am* volunteering to help set this up. I've done something similar in commercial web-based products I've worked on in the past, so that "administrators" (non-programming staff) can update documentation easily for a given page of our product without making them be programmers. It works rather well. Typically, I fashion a wiki-url with a bit of string manipulation from the URL of the page, and make an RPC call to the wiki to get the document(s) in question. The wiki itself (EG: phpwiki) can be hosted at an unpublished url, and can be password protected. -Ben -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.