Yes. At the risk of building a whole content management system (is puredatabase still built on Zope/Plone?) this seems the sensible format. At some point I would like to move some tutorials I've made onto the system. These are mainly HTML with diagrams and links to patches and sounds. A really thorough system would allow this and make it easy.
But, from a development POV might I suggest that this is ambitious and one would be best to concentrate on just getting it to work right with .pd files to begin with, then add the bells and whistles to allow richer content. But being mindful of future content types cant hurt.
One interesting and challenging enough problem that already exists is how to make sure that help/tutorial/exmaple patches that depend on certain abstractions and externals will always load.
This is a dependency issue not dissimilar to the pakage management needed in something like the Debian apt repository system. It may be possible to tag each resource with its minimum version and libraries needed, or it might be better to hold multiple verions of the same resource and be able to browse by platform and current Pd version.
The way I see it, Puredatabase is not just there to organise and structure documentation, it is there to make maintainance as easy as possible. We have an ongoing struggle to keep helpfiles up to date. One of the views, for maintainers, should reflect those needs. It should be easy enough to use so that anyone who spots an error or omission can quickly log in and make changes Wiki style.
Hope I'm not just prattling on about issues you've already considered.
On Thu, 08 Feb 2007 10:05:10 -0500 marius schebella marius.schebella@gmail.com wrote:
Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
I thought we (the potential users of the database) in this phase could brainstorm and discuss ideas on how we would like it.
I think this should be generated from the meta data in the help files.
For PDDP, we plan on using the help files as the central location for meta data.I would rather have content (in xml style) and layout (webformat, pdf format,...) separated
<object> <objectname>coolobject</objectname> <library>core</library> <description>blablablab</description> <tags>audio,streaming,web,keywords<tags-family> <help-patch> a pd patch... </help-patch> </object> (...and many many more). parsing this meta data into the pd patches is probably easier. and editing the metadata outside, too. (using copy, paste, replace) m.
PD-list@iem.at mailing list UNSUBSCRIBE and account-management -> http://lists.puredata.info/listinfo/pd-list