[Gambas-user] Trashed Docs on Wiki

[Rob Kudla]

On Thu October 20 2005 02:02, Emin Huseynov wrote:
> Why dont you guys have a static help system, and additional
> forum for community discussions.
> Wiki is not the best way to store help info like this.

When we started the wiki, the Gambas documentation consisted of 
one Staroffice document.  The idea of the wiki was to get people 
to contribute more and more documentation and to allow us to 
easily change the structure of the documentation.  To a degree, 
it succeeded.  

Some people complained about the documentation for Gambas 1.0, 
but compared to some of the other high-level languages I've used 
under Linux, it was a dream. (It was also a dream compared to 
VB5 and VB6, which apparently don't install the documentation by 
default, so whenever I visit a client who has done the 
installation themselves, I end up having to google for the 
simplest things.)

And it would have kept working, except every other project in the 
world started doing the same thing and some Russian and Chinese 
spammers learned to abuse wikis.

Benoit has written a new, much faster, much more 
translation-friendly, and much more structured wiki which is 
included in the Gambas 2.0 beta series source.  It requires the 
administrator to manually add users, which will eliminate the 
problem with spambots registering accounts and polluting the 
documentation.  It's much closer to a traditional CMS (which is 
what I think you're describing) while still allowing 
contributions of stuff like example code which is essential to 
community-based documentation.... as proven by MySQL even before 
the popularity of wikis.

> I can help with any kind of php/mysql programming if needed

Benoit's CMS is actually written in Gambas, serving as a pretty 
awesome example of what Gambas can do in a CGI context, and does 
use MySQL as a back end.  But since it's part of the Gambas 
source tree, why not post any of your improvements to it on 
gambas-devel?

Thanks...

Rob