The New Online Manual has gone "Gold"

Started by Angelina Belle, February 15, 2012, 10:26:38 AM

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Angelina Belle

After much work and double-checking, the Simple Machines Team is proud to announce that the new Online Manual is out of its testing phase. Now, SMF documentation is kept in our Online Manual, which we maintain in a free wiki software provided by MediaWiki.org

The truth is, we've been using the new Online Manual wiki as a production service for some time now, while also refining some things. The skin has had some gradual improvements, we've improved the display of code, implemented a wiki translation tool and refined the SMF MediaWiki integration which makes your SMF login "work" on the wiki.

The wiki is still SMF online documentation that anyone can edit. If you have made at least 10 posts on the SMF forum, you can help on the wiki. If you are interested in contributing to the wiki, please see the information on the Community Portal.  Some parts of the wiki are being translated from English into other languages, using a wiki translation tool. So look for more information in the near future about becoming a wiki translator.

Here at SMF, we are using a bridge that allows us to use SMF logins on the wiki. If you are interested in using this bridge on your own site, or helping to develop this bridge, please read more at SMF MediaWiki integration .

If you are interested in writing SMF code, we're always looking, of course.  If you catch any bugs, please submit your fixes on the Bug Reports board.

Many thanks to Joshua Dickerson for pushing for the wiki, to SleePy for getting things all set up, and keeping the documentation team informed about what it has needed to do to keep it moving forward, and to Labradoodle-360 for doing the work in the wiki skin. Many more thanks to Emanuele for improving the code tag, for writing a bunch of useful wiki-templates, for working around persistant problems with the translation tool, and for working with the translators and the localization team.  The translators are doing a great job translating the SMF 2.0 help into many different languages. Thanks to Illori and Emanuele for moving documents from the old online help to the new wiki, and fixing them up when they got there. Thanks to [email protected] for helping to reorganize some of the FAQ material, and for improving some of the documentation based on feedback from many SMF users. And thanks to everyone who has fixed and improved wiki documents. We couldn't do it without you.

------------------
Edit: A little bit of explanation of Online Manual, Documentation, and the new Wiki. And clarification of some of the work that's gone into making it happen.
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. -- Hanlon's Razor

Ozzie

This can get a bit confusing. Some of you call it SMF mediawiki others call it the online manual or just the wiki, it confused me to hell looking for it (the wiki) until I noticed the wiki logo at the bottom of the online manual.
Maybe you should change the name in the menu to something like, online wiki, or wiki manual,wiki documentation, wiki help, or something along those lines to save any further confusion,or maybe its only me not been savvy enough  :laugh:

Only my thoughts....

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Angelina Belle

#2
Ozzie,  that is a good point.  We do use "Online Manual" and "Documentation" interchangeably.
And, since our online manual is kept in a wiki, we throw that into the mix, as well.

Perhaps I could have explained that better in my original post here.

-----

Edit: I have made a small edit to the first paragraph of that post.  I hope that helps.
I have also clarified the kind of help the wiki has received.

Thanks
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. -- Hanlon's Razor

Robert.


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Antes


Liam.

Wait, it wasn't final before? Silly me! Well, nice to see it's Gold now, should help a lot of people out. Why does it show your user name instead of display name in the sidebar, though?

Bigguy

Well done and great work to those who put time into this. :)

Angelina Belle

Liam -- having your username shown in the side bar is a feature of the SMF/mediawiki bridge we use.

This bridge allows the wiki to do its logins through SMF, and use SMF's cookies to maintain login sessions.
But mediawiki does not support the use of a display name separate from the username. So one or the other had to be chosen.
Since the SMF display name is free to be changed by the user, the username seems to me like a logical choice.

But I did not write the bridge.

The bridge seems to work well enough. But I am certain it could be tweaked and improved.  If you are interested in experimenting, you are welcome to get a copy of the bridge and work on it.  Please read more SMF MediaWiki integration released.
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. -- Hanlon's Razor

ThorstenE

With the new wiki the old internal help (action=help) has been wiped out. Not a problem for english speaking users, but all german wiki pages still show the dummy text:
QuoteDiese Seite enthält momentan noch keinen Text. Du kannst diesen Titel auf den anderen Seiten suchen oder in den zugehörigen Logbüchern suchen.
Already said it elsewehere, IMHO it was a big step backwards at least for germans..

Angelina Belle

This change in the help tab for SMF 2.0 was a big change.
By keeping the help information all in one place, this change was meant to make it quicker and easier to keep the help files up to date.

For action=help, you should see something like what we see here at simplemachines.org, when we select the german language.

If you are still having problems with the help action, please start a post on one of the support boards to discuss it.
There must be some solution to the problem.
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. -- Hanlon's Razor

ThorstenE

Quote from: AngelinaBelle on February 16, 2012, 02:11:05 PM
For action=help, you should see something like what we see here at simplemachines.org, when we select the german language.
yes I do, but all links in that list point to a non-existant wiki page: http://wiki.simplemachines.org/smf/Registering/de

Quote from: AngelinaBelle on February 16, 2012, 02:11:05 PM
There must be some solution to the problem.
yep, someone needs to re-write the old action=help (the german version, which was ~95% complete) as wiki-pages.

SleePy

Well your welcome to start translating TE :D
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Angelina Belle

I understand what you mean now. It is the untranslated page on the wiki which gives the problem.
It could be described as a bug. SMF can check for the page. And the page is there. But we would really rather see the base (English) text if the translated text is not available, not the notice that the text has not been translated.

I think we should discuss this in bugs.  I do not know what would be required to fix this problem.
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. -- Hanlon's Razor

ThorstenE

Quote from: SleePy on February 16, 2012, 02:27:07 PM
Well your welcome to start translating TE :D
You're joking, right? ;) Well, I have quite a bit of spare time but let's be honest, the german help was ~95% complete and has been totally wiped out by a team decision.  You can't expect from someone to do the entire work (again)...

Angelina Belle

I agree - the change to the new help is a big hassle for the translations.

It would be possible to copy the strings out of the language editor into the wiki translation tool, because the pages on the wiki are > 95% identical to what was in the language editor at the time.
But even this will take time, as you can see by the fact that the German wiki translation has not been done.
We did not have a tool to automate the proces.

At this time, a few changes have been made to the base (English) pages. These changes were mostly made at the request of translators. This means that, after copying strings from the LE, the translator would need to check if the original had changed, and update the translated string.
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. -- Hanlon's Razor

Adish - (F.L.A.M.E.R)


Jakob Fel

Congrats guys, reading this announcement brought back a lot of the fond memories of my time on the Doc Helpers team. :)
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sharks

Awesome! This is going to be extremely helpful, especially the option to allow others to modify and improve the articles.

GravuTrad

Quote from: AngelinaBelle on February 16, 2012, 03:07:43 PM
I agree - the change to the new help is a big hassle for the translations.

It would be possible to copy the strings out of the language editor into the wiki translation tool, because the pages on the wiki are > 95% identical to what was in the language editor at the time.
But even this will take time, as you can see by the fact that the German wiki translation has not been done.
We did not have a tool to automate the proces.

At this time, a few changes have been made to the base (English) pages. These changes were mostly made at the request of translators. This means that, after copying strings from the LE, the translator would need to check if the original had changed, and update the translated string.

+1
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