Since there doesn’t seem to be much demand for video tutorials on “how to contribute to PiTiVi”, I have been thinking about how to reorganize the wiki. Indeed, a comment on my previous blog post made me realize how hopelessly messy our documentation for new contributors was.
I pictured myself as a stranger to the project: I wouldn’t know where to get started on learning the code because the developer documentation is confusing as hell.
Since we have an awesome, welcoming and comprehensive website for users, I came up with a new rule: to reduce confusion, the wiki should be focused for contributors. There should be no user-centric topics in the wiki. This approach allows:
- Increased consistency.
- Easier maintenance.
- Increased chances of people actually bothering to get involved with PiTiVi.
- World domination.
I quickly restructured the whole thing visually (thanks, Freemind):
…and then procrastinated on it for exactly one month.
Today, I decided to JFDI, and spent eight hours and twenty minutes cleaning up the mess.
Okay, maybe not 8 hours and 20 minutes, as I spent about 20 minutes eating. But other than that, Hamsters don’t lie, and it was indeed a fight of epic proportions:
- Pages have been renamed so that their titles actually make sense
- Utterly useless and obsolete pages have been deleted (some still remain)
- All the important pages have been properly categorized (a.k.a. “tagged”). Now, we don’t have to manually manage pages such as what used to be “Welcome developers”, and we can now “tag” pages that seem obsolete or incomplete
- I removed the remaining redundant information that was already on the website
- I split a ton of pages. The documentation about core components and UI components is now two separate things.
It’s not perfect, and there’s a ton of old or incomplete contents (please help me identify them!), but I’m pretty sure that not only will it be easier to maintain, but it will be much easier to find what you’re looking for (and to know that stuff exists in the first place).
Front page: before and after.
Alright now guys and girls, no excuses. Get crackin’ !
In other news
- Spent time reorganizing the website during the holidays. The screenshots page is much prettier (and up to date) and the showcase page (now a separate page) too: it uses HTML5 videos if you activated the HTML5 mode in Youtube and in Vimeo. Since it seems like many visitors didn’t even know we had a showcase, I went medieval and just put a showcase video (and link) directly on the front page.
- Migrated my web server to a professional hosting service (instead of hosting it on my DSL connection). My blog should cope with Planet GNOME much more easily now.
- Actually spent time hacking on PiTiVi during the holidays. I implemented a handful of small feataures (and fixed some bugs), but I’m not blogging about them until they’re merged.
- Very happy with GNumeric now using GTK+ theme colors for cell selections and headers. Sometimes you just have to ask nicely.
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Comments
4 responses to “Reorganizing the wiki”
You rock ! 🙂
Bravo 🙂
Great work on the wiki. There are still some broken pages, but a big improvement. I also liked the video idea because we are developing a video editor. I would also like a page that points to different tutorials and resources. I am currently trying this: http://www.thenewboston.com/?cat=40&pOpen=tutorial
This allows people that have no knowledge of programming (like me) to learn and contribute.
Brian
Hi! I just bumped with this install how-to for gst-editor and I just loved it. I don’t know if you have something similar for PiTiVi but I really recommend it. Add a jhbuild section and an ubuntu required apt-get command line and it would be perfect.