just another manic wikiday ..

another busy friday on the dev wiki for me. with new years celebrations peeking around the corner there weren't as many other people around compared to past weeks, but Dominik Haumann and myself did have company.

there were additions made to the solid tutorial, several corrections and other minor edits provided by the eagle-eyes (and fingers) of readers and the kexi team discussed pulling their developer content over to the wiki. Dominik also started looking at the isv section and researching what others have already written on the topic around the 'net.

as for myself, i got pulled into a couple of unexpected but fruitful discussions throughout the day but still managed to put up a number of i18n/l10n tutorials. virtually all of that material was pulled over from the rather comprehensive kde i18n howto. in fact, it's almost too comprehensive. i spent quite a bit of time grooming passages, rearranging the order of sections, updating code examples and breaking it out into several separate tutorials.

this is something i'd actually really appreciate some feedback on: in line with the "university of kde"/lyceum concept, i've set up a couple of sections in the tutorials area much as one might find courses in an american university system. which is to say, they are numbered according to the nature and complexity of the information they cover, have a nice little abstract and note prerequisites (both for technologies you need and tutorials you should cover first). so, for example, "localization 101" covers the basics of unicode and Qt while "dbus 211" covers creating interfaces (and has dbus 101 and 201 as prereq's).

the idea is to give the reader a sense of what order to cover the material in each section as well as a way to succinctly note what you should know about before diving in over head. this way if someone wants to go and learn about a particular advanced topic, they can figure out what they need to know first by looking at the tutorial on that topic and working their way backwards through the prerequisites.

eventually i'd love to see a mediawiki module/plugin/whatever-they-are-called that can help automate the process a bit, including allowing tutorial authors and editors to select prerequisites via an html form listing existing tutorials and known technologies as well as tracking for logged in users so they can see alongside the pre-req's what they've already covered. such a thing is a ways down the road, but before i start spending too much thought and energy in that direction, i'd like to hear from people who might actually end up using the developer wiki to learn if this would be useful to them.

you can either let me know your opinion in a comment attached to this blog entry or by emailing me directly (aseigo at kde dot org). and if you're a mediawiki savvy php developer who'd like to take a crack at such a plugin, please let me know =)