use of alerts on the help wiki

[Matthew East]

Hi Andrew,

On Mon, Sep 22, 2008 at 1:21 AM, Andrew Sayers
<andrew-ubuntu-doc at pileofstuff.org> wrote:
> What I was trying to say is that, as a standing rule, I like to build
> "tweak me!" knobs into projects, to encourage people to get involved.  A
> salient (but unextraordinary) example is that it was mainly luck a week
> ago that I didn't think "there's no alert thingy, that's a shame... oh
> well, never mind", and leave it at that.

Yes, we need to make it a bit easier to find out how to contribute to
the visual aspect of the help wiki. But in this case, I don't think
it's necessary to build any extra knobs into the Alerts, because we
will write on the relevant page that ideas for other alerts can be
discussed here...

> As I say, I agree it's more
> important to have a learnable system in the simple case, I just need to
> work through all the options before accepting there's no way to have my
> cake and eat it.

Ok!

> For the record, I don't think anyone could accuse me of letting go of a
> problem too easily once I've sunk my teeth into it - and by way of
> proof, here's another implementation.  I suspect this will be the last
> implementation I need to write - it fixes what I guess is your bug and
> includes a generic Alert macro that can be disabled by renaming the file
> to Alert.py.disabled.  I'll open up a Bazaar branch if more revisions
> are needed, to avoid further spamming the list with tarballs.

Ok, let's run with this one. I've added it to my bzr branch here so
you can easily branch or send bundles.

https://code.launchpad.net/~mdke/ubuntu-doc/helpwiki-newtheme

However, it doesn't work for me. The error I got when logged out is
now present all the time:

http://paste.ubuntu.com/49206/

> This implementation moves all the tweakable things over to Note.py,
> including a few new ones.  In particular, changing "True" to "False" on
> line 22 tells the program to use the five doc.ubuntu icons instead of
> the three help.ubuntu ones - I think that using the same icons on both
> sites will make life easier for readers, authors and maintainers.

I agree, let's just use those icons rather than having it
configurable. I've added the three relevant icons to the theme so they
will be at /htdocs/ubuntunew/img/note.png (etc).

I'll have the theme synched with the wiki today so they will be
available at https://help.ubuntu.com/htdocs/etc to test with.

> Fair enough - how about leave <<Alert()>> out for now, write a
> HelpOnAlerts page, edit alerts into a handful of pages, then think
> again?  Maybe we'll prove that three alerts cover the entire problem
> space, maybe we'll decide that every page needs its own alert type.

Heh, I suspect not the latter. Anyway, we'll want to integrate the
guidelines for using the alerts to the existing help wiki writing
guidelines, probably here -
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WikiGuide/WritingGuide. But that is
easy to do when we have the macro ready and uploaded (note: before
uploading to the help wiki, it will need a security review from
Canonical, so that may take a few days).

I'm hoping to get Adam Sommer's ReleaseVersion macro uploaded too
(I've added that to the bzr branch too). I've tested it and it looks
really good. That will allow authors to specify which versions of
Ubuntu a particular page is valid for.

-- 
Matthew East
http://www.mdke.org
gnupg pub 1024D/0E6B06FF