Re: Proposal for building knowledgebase website.

Magnus, Dave,

> > Now, if you can throw together something in a couple of hours, that
> > satisfies everyone's concerns ... ?
>
> When I suggested that was possible I got shot down in flames <sob>

I've had all too much experience using CMSes which were "thrown together in a
couple of hours" lately.  The WYSWYG editing is the easy part -- there are
several OSS components to do that.  What requires work and *considerably*
more than a couple hours of troubleshooting includes:

Permissions (like, can any author edit any article, or only the author who
wrote it, or only editors?)
Authentication
Navigation
Moderation (who can approve articles and how?)
File Uploads
Author Attribution

A mature CMS (like Bricolage) handles these things in a user-tested manner.  A
2-hour CMS wouldn't handle them at all, instead counting on a WWW-admin to
fix things whenever they get broken -- which would be every day.

The idea of using something like Bricolage for TechDocs is that when it
becomes popular, nobody on this list necessarily needs to be involved in
day-to-day operation.   That is, you designate a few trusted authors as
moderators, and they take care of moderation and "burning".  The only time
you get involved is if the CMS-->CVS gateway breaks down.

BTW, one issue with CMS-->CVS: how will we delete articles?

I'll talk to David Wheeler about this on Monday when he's back from the 'con.

--
Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco