Developing Yelp [was Re: From the docteam meeting]

[Don Scorgie]

On Mon, 2006-07-24 at 21:51 +0200, Andreas Lloyd wrote:  
> Cool! I guess we should note that somewhere. I'll try a few test
> searches to see what pops up.

Thanks.  I was also thinking about logging the searches that people do
on the forums (presumably, Ubuntu will customise the URL to point to the
Ubuntu Forums).  I've already asked if its possible on the GNOME forums
(default link for the search), but the more results, the better.

<snip lots of interesting and relevant stuff>
> 
> By the way,  I didn't think the tool bar that cluttered. I was imagining
> the button at the far right of the toolbar, so that it wouldn't get in
> the way of the other functions yet was easily visible.

The problem with the button on the toolbar is that its not a standard
feature, so would have to be labelled, and "Contribute" is quite a long
word.

There is also a standing request (our oldest bug!) to add a throbber to
Yelp (like Nautilus and Epiphany have in the top right corner).  Adding
that and the contribute button would definitely make things more
crowded.

> 
> I suppose that a short-term solution (until Yelp will be all glittering
> Mallard goodness) would be to add something to the coming DocBook export
> function that adds an extra line at the bottom of each exported page
> with the text "Does this work for you? Share your experiences, tips and
> tricks and improve the Ubuntu documentation" with a link to original
> exported page. That should be doable. I suppose that is something I
> should get that Summer of Code student to look at, instead.

That should be doable.  It might even be doable in Yelp.  We use XSLT to
process the docbook into HTML.  It would be (relatively) trivial to add
an extra comment / line at the bottom of every generated page along
these lines.  Although doing that the easy way (i.e. as little
modification as possible) would have to link to a page with a list of
the docs, as opposed to directly to the section in the wiki.  Although
this may be possible as well.  It would also add the comment to every
non-Ubuntu document.

Don