Hi all,
On 14/06/2009, at 4:20 PM, Gilles VINCENT wrote:
This was in reaction to a discussion about to name to give to a new functionality in SPIP : themes in the private area.
In your opinion, which impression of SPIP can be perceived by non-french speaking developers ?
I didn’t read the linked messages too closely (Google translate kills gmane’s interface and doesn’t translate all that well :-] ) but I have a few comments about the topic in general.
There have been a few mentions of the fun side and personality of SPIP which sounds great, but comes as a surprise to me: I didn’t realise that there is any such theme to the SPIP terminology. By the time we see most of these concepts, whatever humour or fun there is in the French terminology has been translated away. The only difficulty I see here is where the « official » SPIP translation differs from the « normal », e.g., English name for something. The skeletons vs. templates thing is a good example.
I’d like to reiterate the point that Heiko Jansen made: that the state of the (developer) documentation makes SPIP amongst the least accessible Open Source projects I’ve used. I’ve been using SPIP full-time for nearly two years now, and frequently doing « new » things. All too often I find myself tracing PHP code because the documentation just isn’t there, even in French!
The situation is improving, but there is still a long way to go. Just compare <http://api.drupal.org/> and <http://doc.spip.org/> to see the difference in the depth and coverage of the Drupal and SPIP documentation. I’d love it if SPIP had such complete documentation in French or English or, even better, both. Without it, those of us trying to learn about SPIP are flying blind. This is a real barrier to entry for those who want to contribute to SPIP, French-speaking or not. In particular, some sort of architectural overview of SPIP would be very much appreciated by people like me, who want to start investigating and modifying SPIP’s internals (I, for one, am interested in the template parser and compiler and the « typographical shortcuts » processor).
Another point, raised by Martín, is that some, possibly a lot, of the documentation seems to be out of date and incomplete. Just look at the « anti-doublons » pattern that Fil described on this list last week. It is mentioned on the http://spip-contrib.net/ page that Gilles linked to, but to actual find that page you’d nearly need to know the answer already. <http://programmer.spip.org/> has the potential to address at least some of these gaps, but there is a lot left to be translated and it will never be the complete « reference » that, in my opinion, SPIP does need and that <http://spip.net/> currently fails to be.
To contradict him though, « translating » the documentation has only three prerequisites: that you know your own language, that you know the topic, and that you can use Babelfish or Google Translate. Anyone can help translate documentation and everyone is encouraged to jump-in, it’s easy and you’ll almost certainly learn something, either some French or some SPIP or both, I know I have! I’m sure that Gilles or Fil or someone will be able to point anyone who wants to help in the right direction (We could use some help translating <http://programmer.spip.org/> into English!)
The idea was raised before of an English SPIP site and I think that that is entirely the wrong direction to go in. Rather than fragmenting the community and documentation even more, perhaps we should think about going in the other direction: concentrating effort and information on fewer sites rather than more?
Finally, from speaking from my own point of view, I think that the « documentation issue » really is one of SPIP’s key drawbacks at the moment. We’d love to use SPIP for all our projects (except where it isn’t appropriate, of course) but we’ve had a number of projects where we could not, primarily because of the documentation: clients simply cannot invest large amounts of money in projects without knowing that their investment does not depend on a single relatively small company (How many companies out there are using SPIP? Is there a « commercial SPIP users group »? Perhaps we should start one?).
To sum up: we need better documentation (in French or English or both) than we have. It should be complete and up-to-date and should make it much easier than it currently is to learn about SPIP and begin using and contributing. Without it, the community can grow only so much.
I feel a little presumptuous asking, but do the SPIP developers have any requests or suggestions? How can we, the community, help them to make SPIP, the documentation and the community better?
Regards,
Thomas Sutton
Web Developer
bouncingorange
graphic + web design
