How's the Bazaar website going?

[Ian Clatworthy]

Emma Jane wrote:
> On Wednesday 19 August 2009 7:50:48 pm Ian Clatworthy wrote:

> One of the advantages of having entry points in the Wiki is that this is how I 
> first got involved in the project: by writing a Wiki page for the plugins I was 
> using. It would be fantastic if we could map out the whole site and where you 
> see the official documents and the Wiki documents co-existing. Right now I'm not 
> even sure that I'm aware of all of the awesome new documentation that you're 
> writing!!

Hi Emma,

FWIW, I'm not writing much currently. 2.0's docs are essentially done
because I'm now healthy enough to fix bugs instead. :-)

Seriously though, scope-wise we'll have:

1. A nicer doc website in multiple languages
   (http://doc.bazaar-vcs.org/en/)

2. Prettier presentation (thanks to Sphinx)

3. Some important new manuals:

   * 2.0 Upgrade Guide
   * Data Migration Guide
   * Plugins Guide (99% automatically generated content)

And let's not forget our shiny new website that you're working on! After
all, it's probably the only "doc" 95% of users will read!

Time permitting, someone (me if no-one else steps forward I suspect)
should try converting our docs to CHM format for Windows and Help Viewer
format for OS X. They are the preferred formats for the shiny new
installer/bundle we'd like to see put together for 2.0 for those platforms.

When I'm *really* dreaming, I find a few days spare after fixing bugs to:

* get our doc bundling sorted so each language has it's own bundle - not
  all languages in the one archive

* get PDF conversion sorted

* churn out an Explorer Guide and an Admin Guide - the two major pieces
  still missing from our documentation set.

Nevertheless, *I* think our docs for 2.0 aren't bad and arguably on par
(or better?) than those from git and hg. We're still well short of what
I'd like though and behind svn IMO.

>> It would be cool to move to a more database-centric
>> plugins registry that allowed ratings, comments, etc (ala
>> addons.mozilla.org) instead of a Wiki page but that's certainly not in
>> scope for 2.0.
> 
> My plan is to break the table into multiple smaller pages by category and to 
> expand the space for each of the plugins. Right now it's very difficult to 
> entice people to add documentation (or to even understand where they should 
> put it). Sometimes there is more information as part of the actual project, 
> but nothing on the Web to evaluate if a plugin is appropriate. I don't want to 
> replicate work that you are also doing though.

I don't think we'll overlap much. My goal with the Plugins Guide is to
expose (and hence improve the quality of) the help built-in to each
plugin. *If* the help is up to date, it will allow potential users to
see exactly what a plugin offers without installing it. Well, that's the
intention at least.

Ian C.