Book On TWiki

We all know that documentation is scattered around twiki.org. It's about time to move forward and consolidate all these resources into a central place. The Book is contributed by the community, but must have key dedicated individuals that keep track on the quality of sections.

Three books are suggested.

Nutshell

The Nutshell Book comprises of generic and common understanding of TWiki. It includes,

• System requirements and its fallbacks
• The purpose of TWiki
  • Disadvantages and advantages of TWiki - What TWiki is and what it is not!
  • Specific use cases
  • Also on ConvincingYourBoss
• Installation of TWiki on various platforms
  • Include what works and what does. Which requires expert knowledge, which doesn't.
  • Step by step guide (to improve README and INSTALL)
• Installation of Plugins, Contribs, Addons, and Templates/Skins
  • Introduction to =configure='s FindMoreExtension
• Customisation (Generic level)
  • Introduction to the structure of TWiki
  • Customising common Plugins
  • Understanding Templates and Skins
  • e.g. ConsolidateShorterURLs

Reference

The Reference Book goes in depth for developers/users who wish to further customise their TWiki environment. So it will include specifics on Plugin/Contrib/Addon/Template/Skin customisation with its API.

Each of them has their own Topic which describes the API, so reference linking is suffice.

A very important part of this Book, is examples. Examples that can be found in Sandbox, for instance. A wide range of examples is a must.

• TWikiScripts
• TWiki.*DotPm

Developer

The Developer Book provides technical knowledge of TWiki's engine. It includes...

• Structure of TWiki
• Dependencies?
• How-to write good Plugins/Contribs/Addons/Templates/Skins
• Deprecations (if any)

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The entire purpose of this exercise is to not rely on twiki.org as a whole, but rather on any of these 3 relevant books that should have everything under the Internet/Intranet about TWiki.

This should provide support for DocumentationRating and others.

-- Contributors: KwangErnLiew - 11 May 2007

Discussion

Kwang, you bring up some good points. Instead of writing a new book from scratch, how about extending the existing DistributionDocuments to be in a format/with content where we can create a TWiki book? There is alerady a lot of good material, but it is currently mainly focusing on the technical details. We could even enhance the build script to generate a nice PDF book out of selected distribution documents.

BTW, the Wikis for Dummies book (to be published in the June 2007) covers TWiki quite a bit, as well as social aspects of deploying wikis.

-- PeterThoeny - 12 May 2007