[libreoffice-website] Re: [libreoffice-l10n] Improving the usage of help.libreoffice.org site

Hi Christian

Thank you and Adolfo for your replies. My main point was simply the huge amount of work and that 
small teams are trying to do. (EO team in my case). Obviously we have to prioritize our tasks. I am 
trying to get a better feel for what is most important. We have the UI done, but the help is at 
about 40% done. I have stopped working on it because I found that some of the menus have changed in 
LO 4.0 and I personally don't want to translate stuff now and have to do it again when the help has 
been updated for v 4.0.

On 18/02/2013, at 1:15 AM, Christian Lohmaier wrote:

> Hi Donald,
>
> On Sun, Feb 17, 2013 at 7:15 AM, Donald Rogers <donr2648@clear.net.nz> wrote:
> > It seems to me that there is a lot of duplication of effort and fragmentation of the help. We 
> > have at least the following:
> >
> > LO Help from the Help menu
> > help.libreoffice.org
>
> Those are identical. That's the whole point of help.libreoffice.org
That's good. (I mostly use the menu help)
> > wiki.documentfoundation.org
>
> this is more developer / active contributer oriented and less for
> endusers, although stuff is published there. But there's another
> discussion (or actually in this thread, I lost track) about not
> "abusing" wiki to publish large files, etc.
>
> > the guides
> > FAQ
>
> How can these be extra points when these are hosted on the mentioned sites?
They all add to the work that could be done.
> > ask.libreoffice.org
>
> A user-helps-user platform, no static documentation, but
> answeres/solutions for specific problems. You cannot cover every
> cornercase in regular documentation.
>
> > accessibility info
> > features
>
> See above, not really belong here as separate points, as they are
> found on sites. Otherwise you could just make separate bulletpoints
> for whetever you like.
> But the new-features page surely is also a marketing tool.
>
> > installation instructions
>
> Nobody reads those anyway :-) But what is wrong with having those?
I am not saying there is anything wrong with having them. They have to be accessible before 
installing LO, so obviously aren't part of the menu help.
> > mailing lists
>
> similar to ask.libreoffice.org, but most mailinglists are for
> coordination of active contributors. And while ask.libreoffice.org is
> fine for easy problems, more complex ones are better off on the maiing
> list.
>
> > Nabble
>
> That's just an interface to the mailinglists. Not everybody likes
> using their mailclient. And you forgot gmane/newsgroup interface, that
> also is an additional way to access/participate in the mailing lists.
>
> > IRC
>
> (near) real-time discussion - so again a different scope, useful for
> different stuff than the other ways to get help.
>
> You did happily mix passive sources of information with interactive stuff...
Each has a separate focus, as I see it.
> > The guides are very good but to localize them requires not just translation and adaption, but 
> > also all the screen shots and other pictures need to be redone for each language. This would be 
> > a huge task. There are no guides yet for version 4.0.
I just checked. EN has guides for 3.4, 3.5, 3.6 or 4.0, and ID has the full set of about 80 
documents for LO 3.3, 3.4 or 3.5. FR has 36 (by my count) for LO 3.5 or 3.6. All other languages 
apparently have none. (I looked on wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation/Publications/fr and 
equivalent pages.)
> The principles of usage are the same, so no big deal really... And
> whether you do the screen shots or not is also a matter of taste...
> But doing screenshots of dialogs is getting easier and easier thanks
> to the "gladification" of the UI.
What is "gladification"?
> > If we are to continue to have both the Help menu help and help.libreoffice.org help, can someone 
> > write some code to generate the help.libreoffice.org help from the same .po files that are used 
> > for the Help menu help?
>
> That was already answered help.libreoffice.org is what is in the help-module.
>
> > What sort of help is meant to be in the wiki?
>
> See above. I see it mainly as a source for information for active
> contributors/developers, less so for the enduser.
>
> > Is there any possible synergy between the FAQ and ask.libreoffice.org? Are they to be localized 
> > too?
>
> well, apart from people monitoring what kind of questions get asked
> the most on ask.libreoffice.org, there is no synergy. Questions are
> too widespread/too special in most cases.
>
> > LO apparently doesn't have the people power to keep even the English helps up to date, let alone 
> > all the other languages. Some of the localization teams are very small and can't keep up with 
> > even one of the help systems.
>
>
> Please explain / give an example what you are talking about here. I
> hate statements like that.
LO is about to publish version 4.0.1 but we have not yet finished the help for 4.0.0.
> > The Wiki is easier to work with than the CMS.
>
> What CMS please. There are tons of them.
I refered to the Silverstripe CMS that we use in xx.libreoffice.org. This is not an important 
point, and I am biased because I have used Wikipedia for editing and I am quite familiar with it, 
but I have not used Silverstripe much yet.
> ciao
> Christian

Thanks again.
Donald


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