I'm new to Pd but...
I'm an experienced web developer. I think the puredata.info does have
some issues which could be fixed but with some time and effort. My
recommendation would be to use an opensource CMS like Drupal to
manage the community side of stuff because:
- Its taxonomy module is a very powerful tool for organising and
cross referencing content and is easy to use
2. Its very easy to extent so modules for Pd specific content could
be wiped up quickly as required.
3. Massive development community and is updated and patched constantly.
4. Won the "Open Source CMS Award" this year (http://www.packtpub.com/
award) so must be doing something right.
5. Excellent multi-lingual support.
6. Flexible and fast setup. Content migration might slow this down
however.
I would also use Wiki for reference documentation as community driven
documentation is always good I find, provided there are watch dogs to
revert bad changes. Also offers multi-lingual for parallel
translation of content.
Some good examples of API web-sites are:
- Dojo javascript Toolkit (http://dojotoolkit.org/)
- Drupal site
- Has a "Book" which is a standard Drupal module and good for intro
guildes and tutorials (see: http://dojotoolkit.org/book/dojo-book-0-4)
- Good forums
- Ability to track content a user has been involved in (including
yourself)
- Planet funcitonaliy (RSS feed aggregation) helping to stitch a
scattered community together.
JQuery documentation Wiki (http://docs.jquery.com/Main_Page)
- Wiki reference manual
- External libraries can integrate with a central documentation
- Tutorials section
- Clean, logical grouping of functions by concept
PHP Documentation (http://www.php.net/manual/en/)
- Central index of all libraries
- Examples for each (most) functions
- The best feature is the user comments which are filtered to only
useful input which includes examples. This usually means that most of
the common tasks/problems are solved for you and even iteratively
improved.
these are just some examples that you might consider when thinking
about features that are desirable on a community site based around an
API.
I think there is a strong argument for going with a large opensource
CMS, especially if you are not full time for the website as you get
upgrades for free and with a big community the chance that someone
has solved most of the problems your going to encounter already.
I'm teaching Content Management Systems at a Uni in Berlin this year,
which is why I'm so into CMSs at the moment :)
On 06/11/2007, at 10:22 PM, Andy Farnell wrote:
On Mon, 5 Nov 2007 11:33:02 -0500 Hans-Christoph Steiner hans@eds.org wrote:
Right, for user patches, tec. puredata.info has sections. Perhaps they could be improved.
Yeah, I looked and failed to find the sections. Obviously the
potential is there for .info to be a wonderful central node, but it does have
usability problems imho.-- Use the source
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