Wiki Organization...

[Guest]

Now, I am pretty knowledgeable about OSCommerce and have been playing with the system for almost 2 years now. Occasionally, I wish to look at the Wiki documentation. However, I find it completely disorganized and spread over too many pages. This makes it unwieldy and I give up before I ever find what I am looking for.

 

For example, the programming standards are spread over 18 pages. This would be a lot better to cross reference if it was on one page since everything inter-relates. In order for it to be usable, I have to copy and paste the information into a word processor, reformat and then print it. For any other project, I just have to click print in my browser on their programming standards page and I get it all nicely formatted.

 

Personally, I would suggest a book/chapter format instead of having each little snippet on its own page. Books are in the format they are because it facilitates reading and is comfortable to the end user. Having to click on links, then back and then on links, doesn't facilitate reading. You could go through the entire site to find the snippet you want or use the the search if you knew what exactly you are searching for. However if someone is a newcomer, then they won't necessarily know what they are searching for. Even then, the search provides a list of results with names that don't necessarily mean anything. For instance the first result for a search on "Catalog Box" is "helpAdminDownloads". Which has nothing to do with the catalog or boxes in reality. A search on "Category Box" returns the following as the first result: "helpHowtoDisplayCategoryName". Again that has nothing to do with Boxes but at least it has something to do with Categories. Wouldn't it be more useful if the search results returned results like: "[How To] Display Category Name as Page Title". I mean it is different from displaying the category name in the status bar or placing the category name on the product info page.

 

A little more forethought into the organization of the project, better titles and a easier to use search, would make this a worthy project. As it is right now, it is easier to just ask questions in the forum and hope for an answer.

[Ian]

Wayne,

 

As the person who put up the majority of the programming standards section I suppose I need to reply to this.

 

I've just navigated thru the standards pages, and I think I would agree to an extent that it's a bit of a slog.

 

I'll put a page with everything altogether for people to use as a comparison, then decide on the format people prefer.

 

As for the search, at the moment we are stuck with what the wiki code gives us. However I don't see any reason why we could not use some form of wiki-meta-tag, to not only give us a proper title, but also allow page authors to add a keywords list.

 

As always it's a matter of prioritising.