physos.org

So it is finally finished, the first “live” version of the new docs.kde.org engine. I hope I achieved my goal to make it more usable. It sure is easier to maintain for me, the main reason not being the older framework. The old framework did a terrific job, and I still have to add some aspects of it. Easy access for Google for example. The new framework consists of Bash and PHP scripts which I have more experience with.

You want technical details? You want to leave a a comment? You just want more?

Here it comes.

The framework consists of two parts:

• A Bash script fetching and building the docs, which outputs a PHP array with informations.
• A PHP script building the page out of this array.

Both are not the best Bash or PHP I have ever written, but they taught me some nice new tricks.

There are many “special cases” in the KDE documentation, you have to take care of. KControl comes to mind, or KInfoCenter. These make the index.php script a 12KB monster.

The changing SVN structure triggered several big modifications of the fetchdocs script. It now fetches the docs for 20 languages (more to come) and two branches. The KDE Documentation is now developed and translated mainly in 2 branches, stable and development. This is reflected in docs.kde.org structure. I have not decided yet, if I add older releases when stable becomes 3.5. If you have a need for < 3.4 documentation please drop me a mail or a comment.

The User Guide and the FAQ got a more prominent place, so they can be easily accessed. For languages who did not have the manpower to translate those two big documents so far, there is a fallback solution to the English original.

The extragear applications are not available in the stable branch for obvious reason (they are released separately), but the development branch gives me the opportunity to provide them. I am still wondering on how to emphasize this fact a bit more.

If you are an extragear application maintainer, please be aware about the changed structure of the extragear documentation. Please adjust your paths if you link to documentation on docs.kde.org.

Plans for the future:

• PDF generation
• Put the array in a database. (Performance improvement?)
• Other structures than packages. (.desktop files -> Genre, Alphabetical ( big K*??) )

I want to thank all the people who helped me with this. To name a few, Dirk for being the master sysadmin he is (and the wizard of mod_rewrite rules), David, Coolo and the others for the new structure of the translates docs in SVN, you made my life much easier and “fetchdocs” several KB smaller. I want to give a special thank #kde-docs, who are a wonderful bunch of people to hang out and work with. Lauri, Phil, Jess and all the non regulars (/me waves to Aaron) make KDE documentation fun and made docs.kde.org a lot better.

And a very special thank goes out to the people often overlooked. The documentation writers and translators. I hope docs.kde.org helps to give you an impression on the hugh amount of work done by volunteers in documenting KDE in as many languages as possible.

Update: I wanted only a part of the message to show up on planetkde, but that failed . Have to investigate a bit more how to get this into my feed with Wordpress. if somebody already knows, leave me a message.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 27th, 2005 at 7:48 and is filed under KDE. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.