Online Manual 411

[codenaught]

The SMF Online Manual is something that wasn't built in a day. Though hopefully no one expected that it was! Most users probably have noticed that the Online Manual is completely powered by SMF. That "Powered by SMF" at the bottom is not just some joke. What you see on the OM (Online Manual) is a theme made by Bloc that sets out to mimic a wiki documentation style thats purpose is to make it easy to read the content and navigate through the content.

The wiki theme was released just a little while after the OM was made public. Prior to the OM being announced, some treasure hunters may have come across the OM. While the OM wasn't finished, we decided there was no real harm in restricting it for those lucky enough to find it early. We also felt it was a good idea to release the theme so others who wanted a forum to serve a similar purpose would be able to do so.

Something not everyone knows is the OM wasn't the original source of documentation for SMF. The unreleased SMF wiki was its predecessor. When I joined the team that was what I first worked with. A lot of work was put into the wiki but somewhere down the road, it was decided that we didn't want to go down the path of allowing just anyone to edit anything they wanted. Instead it was decided that it would better to allow users to make comments if they spotted something that could be changed rather than allowing them to directly change it. This doesn't entirely apply to the potential abuse, but perhaps more so to make it easier to fit our needs, and structure it how we wanted it to be. Perhaps the biggest reason for using SMF to power the OM instead of a wiki software was so we could showcase SMF. Show how flexible SMF can be with just minimal (mostly theme related) changes.

So we installed a fresh copy of SMF and started to copy and paste everything from the wiki to the new SMF install. As you may notice if you view the OM, Amacythe, then Doc Coordinator before she was promoted to project manager was the topic starter to many topics because she spent the most time copying the documents over. And it was no fun task. The wiki did not use bbcode so we had to change the tags to match SMF's bbcode tags. If you are curious when all of this move started to happen you can find the first publicly viewable topic here, dated September 06, 2005. Which means the OM has been around for over a year although it wasn't released to the public until March 29 of this year.

So how is the OM structured exactly? Well it does use SMF, so you can imagine it makes use of both boards and topics. Each section that you click on to expand and show more sections on the index page of the OM (Board Index) is a category. The sections that show underneath that, are all boards. When material on a certain subject is too long to put in only one topic we would break it up into multiple topics inside a board.

But why waste all my time explaining how it is structured? You can see it for yourself if you view it with the default theme - http://docs.simplemachines.org/index.php?theme=1.

A few months ago we posted a topic asking for feedback on the OM. It is not too late to provide feedback. We really do appreciate feedback. What you say does not have to be restricted to what is asked in the first post in that topic either. Say whatever comes to mind.

This blog entry is getting quite large, I probably have only said a fraction of the stuff I would like to talk about with the OM, so stay tuned and hopefully I can start to blog about updates to the OM and other exciting developments on a rather frequent basis.

[Gary]

I would also like to make a note, that the Feedback and Suggestion boards on the Doc Site are not for support, thats what the community is for...

But who am I kidding, will those that post support on the doc site read this.