Re: [fat-free-crm-users:649] Re: Futures

[Nathan Broadbent]

Dear Fat Free CRM mailing lists,

As part of our 'community revamping' process, we've just finished a rough attempt at generating a guides site from Fat Free CRM's wiki pages. This was done using the 'guides' gem, which powers documentation for Rails and Spree. 

The first attempt is now live at guides.fatfreecrm.com, and it has a couple of advantages over the raw Github wiki:

• A generated guides index
• Chapter indexes for each page
• Documentation can be more integrated with the main website, including header links to other fatfreecrm.com sites
• Ability to style documentation to match the main site

Instead of migrating to a new guides repository, I've just added the guides generation code into our existing wiki. The benefit of this approach is that anyone with a github account can still edit any of the wiki pages online at https://github.com/fatfreecrm/fat_free_crm/wiki. In the future, our server will be able to re-generate the guides automatically, whenever someone edits one of the pages. 

When editing pages, there are a few changes that you will need to be aware of:

• Each page must start with a title (h2. in textile, or ## in markdown)
• Each page should contain an introduction followed by the keyword: 'endprologue.'
• You must add an entry for that page to the 'Home' index, and follow the existing convention in that index.

If you would like to edit the guides wiki pages on your local machine, you can do so by cloning the FFCRM wiki repository via this URL: g...@github.com:fatfreecrm/fat_free_crm.wiki.git

This is a public repo that everybody has push and pull access to, but we may reconsider permissions in the future (depending on how prone we are to vandalism.)

So all of this is just to let you know where we are heading in terms of documentation. It's currently very rough around the edges, and still needs a lot of work, so please don't post any 'bugs' for it just yet. In particular, the header links, 'Edge guides' and 'legacy guides' are not yet functional.

Thanks to everyone who has contributed to the documentation so far! 

I look forward to sharing more progress updates with you shortly.

Regards,
Nathan B

On Thu, Dec 15, 2011 at 5:57 PM, Keith Edmunds <k...@midnighthax.com> wrote:

Hi Matthew

> Sorry I didn't get back to this sooner Keith. I'm on leave and doing
> stuff in snatches of time.

Not a problem at all: I know only too well how hard it can be to juggle
all the demands upon one's time.

> We have decided to use the approach that Spree uses so we can have our
> docs in github and generate them from there. Nathan, could you perhaps
> explain that a bit for Keith so he can have a play with it?
>
> https://github.com/fatfreecrm/fat_free_crm_guides

Please do point me at any information you have on that. I'm keen to put
some high-quality documentation together: it's an area that a lot of Open
Source projects are weak on, and I consider it critical for a project's
success.

> Keith, you also mentioned that you guys have some server capacity. I
> wondered if that would be something that could be helpful for keeping the
> latest "edge" version of FFCRM running for QA and demo purposes? Just a
> thought.

Tell me what you would want in an ideal world, and I'll see what we can do.

> The idea of a technical book on FFCRM sounds really cool to me. What
> would that involved?

A lot of work! Seriously, in conjunction with the documentation mentioned
above, a dead tree book can only help the project. To answer your
question: I think we need a bit more take-up of ffcrm first, and then it
involves someone (I'd like to do it) talking to the various publishers.
I've talked in the past with O'Reilly about another project, and whilst
that one didn't come to anything, they were helpful. If I were to
undertake this, there would inevitably be questions from me, which would
need time from others to provide answers.

Part of the reason for asking on one of the mailing lists about a roadmap
was because, as it stands, ffcrm needs a bit too much technical help.
That's no problem if someone were to offer it on a SaaS basis, but, for
example, I've just imported our existing accounts and contacts (from
another CRM) into ffcrm. Currently, that isn't something you'd want to do
without some knowledge of SQL, etc. My point here is that, prior to trying
to gain some external publicity for ffcrm, there are a few housekeeping
items that need to be taken care of (not that many, but some).

> PS it seems that the gavel has fallen and we are sticking with the old
> name... not what I expected but that's where we've ended up.

I know there was a feeling that it should be changed, but if I'm honest
I'm not sorry. I think Fat Free CRM is a great name, and it makes it stand
out from the others.

Thanks for the reply -

Keith
--
"You can have everything in life you want if you help enough other people
get what they want" - Zig Ziglar.

Who did you help today?