[Bf-docboard] Bf-docboard Digest, Vol 77, Issue 1

[Bastien Montagne]

Hey mindrones, nice work!

> Message: 1
> Date: Mon, 25 Jul 2011 10:16:11 +0200
> From: mindrones<mindrones at gmail.com>
> Subject: [Bf-docboard] Wiki upgrade status 05
> To: Blender Documentation Project<bf-docboard at blender.org>
> Message-ID:<4E2D264B.1070204 at gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252
>
> 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.
This might be a good tool for really big works (like rewriting a whole 
chapter ;) )…
> 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.
In fact, I think we should just create an extension that would 
condionnaly cache its inner wikicode parsing result, eg. on some page 
changes…

So your templates would stay what they are, simple templates (without 
all this ugly substitution stuff), but wrapped inside a PHP func hook 
that would control their cached result, eg. re-parsing them only when 
their source root page is edited ! Should be really simple (a few lines 
of code, we could even just put it in the BlenderTags.php file), nearly 
non-intrusive, and re-usable for other similar things later on (e.g. a 
reference system… ;) ).

A sort of substitution, in fact, but much more flexible and controllable.

Apart from that tech point, the new navtree is fantastic!
> 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 :)
Ah, yes, dark test on clear background, at last! Hail to the whole skin 
team! :D
> ---
>
>
> 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

Cheers,
Bastien