We need a lot more FAQs

Surely we can come up with numerous FAQs by perusing the logs and the support questions. Can't say it's all that obvious how to grovel through the #twiki logs, but still...

Maybe grep for "how do i"?

-- Contributors: MeredithLesly

Just an example of what MeredithLesly is refering to: in TWikiIRC, someone asked why WebNotify was not working (he has a Cairo codebase). I happen to remember that mailnotify (or whatever is called) needs to be run from a cron job periodically to send the emails, and told him so. But I couldn't find the piece of documentation in the TWiki3 web that say so.

-- RafaelAlvarez - 20 Apr 2006

Whenever I answer a support query that is asking for something "a bit special" I add to CategoryCookbook - for example, I added HowToWatermarkOldRevisions this morning. However it is still very difficult to search the cookbooks/FAQs, because they are scattered over several webs (TWiki, Codev, Support).

Simply collecting the existing FAQs/cookbooks in one place would be a major step forward.

-- CrawfordCurrie - 20 Apr 2006

So here we go again: we need that "one place" to put them. Now. Yes, we definitely need a plan to have an easily navigatible, well organised Doc web, rather than just throwing things there willy nilly. We don't want a Doc web starting to resemble Codev. OTOH, it's a lot easier to figure out how to organise information when you have a decent sample of what you're trying to organise, and surely a not-yet-well-organised but not-very-big-yet Doc web would be more helpful to our users than what we have now.

I estimate that 75% of the (non-usual) people who come to #twiki have questions about installing TWiki and another 20% have questions that are FAQs.

The one slight kicker: it really should be on a machine running Dakar, not Cairo. I know Sven is concerned about the load on develop, but if we don't send people there from twiki.org but merely from #twiki, surely there won't be a huge hit? Alternatively, could the machine that twiki.org is currently on have another domain on it that's running Dakar?

-- MeredithLesly - 20 Apr 2006

CategoryCookbook

my opinion is not that we necessarily need more spaces (ie, webs), but instead we need a better search. perhaps with twiki.org's upgrade to TWiki4, we can also install one of the search indexers?

an ideal search solution should also include the other bits of twiki information out there, eg, http://koala.ilog.fr/twikiirc/bin/irclogger_logs/twiki and perhaps the source forge mailing lists.

-- WillNorris - 20 Apr 2006

"Putting all cookbooks in one place" means put everything in the same web. That way a search on CategoryCookbook or any defined tag will work faster.

Then, if later all those are moved to a Doc web, good.

-- RafaelAlvarez - 20 Apr 2006

Now we just have to figure out where to put them. Sigh.

-- MeredithLesly - 21 Apr 2006

For a start put them in one web, let's say the TWiki web. Then we can easily gather them and move them if and when needed.

-- RafaelAlvarez - 21 Apr 2006

Perhaps that Support might be more appropriate?

-- MeredithLesly - 21 Apr 2006

Agreed. I think Support is the right place as well.

-- CrawfordCurrie - 21 Apr 2006

Good. Let Support be it.

-- RafaelAlvarez - 22 Apr 2006

Let the moving around begin!

-- FranzJosefSilli - 22 Apr 2006

I don't mind moving things when I have time, but I made a quick attempt at trying to organise things in Support and realised that I need Dakar to do it. Not because it can't be done Cairo, just that Dakar contains significant improvements that make it easy. (And, in fact, I couldn't figure out how to make a fairly simple search in Cairo work that would have been fine in Dakar.)

-- MeredithLesly - 24 Apr 2006