Re: Online doc generator

On Apr 10, 2004, at 8:11 AM, Lukas Smith wrote:

Arnaud Limbourg wrote:

Please tell me why we shouldn't drop docbook.

Livedocs. Actually people on pear-doc are working to make the peardoc module work with livedocs. This will hopefully sooner than later allow us to have HTML output of our docs in real time from docbook.

The real question is: based on what list of requirements did PEAR-DOC (or whoever) decide that DocBook was the best choice? What were the *non-technical* decision points? What were the other alternative technologies discussed? We seem to be going at it backwards: requirements *first*, technology and implementation *later*. We make our clients do it, we should do it ourselves. I would argue we have these minimum requirements: 1. Easy online collaboration between identified participants. 2. Ability to allow/deny specific users access to specific documents (particularly for editing). 3. Easy to learn the markup to lower barriers to entry (docs are less sexy than code, let's make it easy to get into them ;-) 4. Easy to translate the document source to multiple output formats, targets, and languages. 5. Fast turnaround between edits and displayed results. 6. A comment system so that users who are not allowed to edit directly can still be heard within context. What are the other requirements for the PEAR document creation/editing/delivery system?

To add to the topic. Bertrand suggested a CMS, I also think it would be good idea to have that or a wiki, so people can easily add documentation.

I agree that a wiki would be good to have. Actually with Paul's efforts we more or less have a wiki. If he wouldnt constantly break the test wiki I could even show it off to you all ;-) *nudge* *nudge*

Yeah, yeah, once I can leave DB_Table alone I can leave the wiki alone. :-)

That being said whatever we do with pearweb in the future we should be eating more of our own dog food so to say. Paul's wiki uses DB_Table and Savant. Especially the later I feel is just a Xipe lite and therefore should be integrated in Xipe or should follow the Xipe API and therefore become a Xipe_lite.

Or if we relax the no-compete clause I can propose Savant and see if it gets voted up or down. I know you think Savant is Xipe; but you also think that DB_Table is DB_DataObject, and others disagree with you there. Perhaps Savant is not as close to Xipe as you opine; let the PEAR users decide. Probably better left to another thread, sorry to respond to you at length here.

With DB_Table it seemed to me that it was about to get proposed.

Will call for votes Mon or Tue, I want to hammer out the remainder of the very good suggestions from the pre-call. -- Paul M. Jones pmjones@ciaweb.net Savant: the simple alternative to Smarty. http://phpsavant.com/