[PD] new pd wiki - practical data - includes forum

A Whillas nospamthankyoumam at tsd.net.au
Tue Nov 6 10:50:25 CET 2007


I'm new to Pd but...

I'm an experienced web developer. I think the puredata.info does have  
some issues which could be fixed but with some time and effort. My  
recommendation would be to use an opensource CMS like Drupal to  
manage the community side of stuff because:

1. Its taxonomy module is a very powerful tool for organising and  
cross referencing content and is easy to use
2. Its very easy to extent so modules for Pd specific content could  
be wiped up quickly as required.
3. Massive development community and is updated and patched constantly.
4. Won the "Open Source CMS Award" this year (http://www.packtpub.com/ 
award) so must be doing something right.
5. Excellent multi-lingual support.
6. Flexible and fast setup. Content migration might slow this down  
however.

I would also use Wiki for reference documentation as community driven  
documentation is always good I find, provided there are watch dogs to  
revert bad changes. Also offers multi-lingual for parallel  
translation of content.

Some good examples of API web-sites are:

* Dojo javascript Toolkit (http://dojotoolkit.org/)
	- Drupal site
	- Has a "Book" which is a standard Drupal module and good for intro  
guildes and tutorials (see: http://dojotoolkit.org/book/dojo-book-0-4)
	- Good forums
	- Ability to track content a user has been involved in (including  
yourself)
	- Planet funcitonaliy (RSS feed aggregation) helping to stitch a  
scattered community together.

* JQuery documentation Wiki (http://docs.jquery.com/Main_Page)
	- Wiki reference manual
	- External libraries can integrate with a central documentation
	- Tutorials section
	- Clean, logical grouping of functions by concept

* PHP Documentation (http://www.php.net/manual/en/)
	- Central index of all libraries
  	- Examples for each (most) functions
	- The best feature is the user comments which are filtered to only  
useful input which includes examples. This usually means that most of  
the common tasks/problems are solved for you and even iteratively  
improved.

these are just some examples that you might consider when thinking  
about features that are desirable on a community site based around an  
API.

I think there is a strong argument for going with a large opensource  
CMS, especially if you are not full time for the website as you get  
upgrades for free and with a big community the chance that someone  
has solved most of the problems your going to encounter already.

I'm teaching Content Management Systems at a Uni in Berlin this year,  
which is why I'm so into CMSs at the moment :)

On 06/11/2007, at 10:22 PM, Andy Farnell wrote:

> On Mon, 5 Nov 2007 11:33:02 -0500
> Hans-Christoph Steiner <hans at eds.org> wrote:
>
>> Right, for user patches, tec.  puredata.info has sections.  Perhaps
>> they could be improved.
>
> Yeah,  I looked and failed to find the sections. Obviously the  
> potential is there
> for .info to be a wonderful central node, but it does have  
> usability problems imho.
>
>
> -- 
> Use the source
>
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