[Bf-docboard] Wiki upgrade status 05

[mindrones]

Hi,

it's been a long time since the last report!

Quite a lot happened under the hood, I'll try to report a bit here.


Wiki trackers
===================

Now we have a wiki tracker for bug reports, feature requests, todos, @

http://projects.blender.org/projects/blend-doc/

Bug tracker
--------------

See http://projects.blender.org/tracker/?atid=510&group_id=163&func=browse

If we agree on this, later on I'll link it to the wiki so that people
goes there to report wiki bugs. The only thing I don't like is that you
need to login to report.


Task manager
---------------

If we want to, we can try to use the task manager at
http://projects.blender.org/pm/task.php?group_project_id=78&group_id=163&func=browse
to experiment and see if it helps coordinating the porting to 2.5/2.6
manual. We could open tasks, assign them, close them, and so on.

No idea if this is overkill, best discussing it here.


Lots of skin bugs solved
===========================

After cleaning up the CSS, Francesco Siddi has solved most of the bugs
in the skin partly related to the upgrade to 1.16.2 and some very old
bug, see the bug tracker.

Notably: [#27318] thumb and frame images can't be centered

Finally, images can be centered!
See centered images at
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Meta:Guides/Style_Guide/Images#Floating_images_.28thumbs_and_frames.29


Google analytics
=================

I have installed the Google Analytics on the wiki, in order to start
collecting information about the keywords used to reach the wiki.
Later on, I'll setup an extension to give pages proper keywords so that
we can attract more readers from search engines :)

** Any SEO expert don't be shy, your help would be much appreciated! **

Meanwhile, here's a screenshot of these last 3 months activity:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Meta:Analitics#2011_May_-_July

Surprisingly enough, we get 1.300.000 page views a month and around
400.000 single visits a months, not bad! :)

Regarding the SEO stuff, there's a sitemap generator maintenance script
on the wiki, I'll test it soon on the development wiki and will apply it
to wiki.blender.org if all goes ok.


Terry Wallwork now monitors spammers!
=======================================

After doing this myself for quite a long time, I gave Terry sysadmin
rights and added him in a special list in our wiki configs so that he
can get mails for *all* wiki edits, in order to let him block spammers.

So far he's doing a great job to keep wiki clean from commercial links.

Thanks Terry!


NavTree
=============

We have worked to have a user-editable navigation tree in the wiki.

You can find it in the sidebar, clicking on the link "NavTree" behind
"Contents" in a page under Doc:Manual, for example:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:Manual/3D_interaction/Manipulation

Within a day I'll add navtree for all the namespaces and contexts, like
Doc:Tutorials, Dev:Contents so on, so that we have these everywhere and
we start using them.

Right now this tree has to be edited in:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:Manual/navtree

---

Some report about the work that has been done/is going on about the
navtree (very techie, skip this if you don't do wiki much).

First off, Francesco has skinned the NavTree to conform to the blender
skin and I have to say it looks great :)

Then, the navtree you see at
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:Manual/navtree&action=edit is not
what was originally planned. Here's why.

I did 2 templates called "Chapter" and "Section" based on the extensions
Variables and HashTables. See:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php?title=Template:Chapter&action=edit
and
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php?title=Template:Section&action=edit

Here is how I used them: in a front page, like Doc:Manual, I've put

{{chapter|Introduction
|{{section|What is Blender?
    |[[Doc:Manual/Introduction|Introduction]]
    |[[Doc:Manual/Introduction/History|Blender’s History]]
    |...
    }}
|{{section|Installing Blender
    |[[Doc:Manual/Introduction/Installing_Blender|Introduction]]
    |[[Doc:Manual/Introduction/Installing_Blender/Python|Python]]
    |...
    }}
}}

{{chapter|...
|...
|...
}}

so that the frontpage itself, the navtree and the previous/next links in
page headers in subpages of Doc:Manual take information from this data.

With my big surprise, the performances were very poor, because the whole
navtree would get calculated each time the page loads, hence each page
containing a navtree would take 4-5 seconds to load, making the wiki
unpleasant to use. Since these templates took a lot of time to be
developed, I was reasonably frustrated :)

I'm investigating on using a very advanced feature in mediawiaki called
Substitution, see: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Substitution

This is way to make so that the wikitext in a page is evaluated when you
save the page, instead of when you view the page, hence making the
wikitext static and not dynamic anymore.
With some trickery using <includeonly> and <noinclude> tags you can
basically build your own cache for a certain template.

The problem I'm facing now, is that Chapters and Sections templates were
already quite complex and using the required syntax (i.e. inserting
{{{|safesubst:}}} everywhere in the templates) makes the templates too
complex to read.
I'm pretty sure that within 2 months I won't remember all the tricks and
magic I'm learning now by trial and error, and I can't document stuff
like "put a space here because xxx", too many cases.

So, yesterday I had a chat with Bastien, and probably I'll try to turn
my templates in php code to write a wiki parser function, possibly with
his help, so that we can use the wiki parser cache system, in the hope
that this will bring us to an easier, faster and cleaner solution.


Sphinx Search
=================

In the development wiki, Marco has setup a new search engine, called
Sphinx. So far it's very fast!

"troubled" from canada is currently collaborating with Marco on fine
tuning it, so that we can select the languages we want to search in, so
that we can avoid bloated results. More on this soon :)


New skin
==========

We have discussed and designed a new skin based on a Francesco's
proposal, and got approval from Ton. We are in the implementation phase now.

Can't show much for now, but I can say that it will be wider to make
room for the navtree, and that it will be dark text on clear background
(finally :)


---


So long, a lot has happened but not much is apparent, I'm sorry about
that  :/

With some luck all this effort will be evident all at once, with a new
bright skin, a new search engine and a proper navigation system :)


Regards,
Luca