Proposal: New Ogre Wiki

Anything and everything that's related to OGRE or the wider graphics field that doesn't fit into the other forums.
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New Wiki FTW?

Aye, we need a better tool
118
67%
Nay, I am perfectly happy with MediaWiki
28
16%
I don't care much either way
31
18%
 
Total votes: 177

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jacmoe
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Proposal: New Ogre Wiki

Post by jacmoe »

Hi Ogre Community :)

<edit>

For the convinience of any newcomers to this topic, I hereby repost the links to the 3 screencasts:

Ogre Wiki Screencast part I

Ogre Wiki Screencast part II

Ogre Wiki Screencast part III

</edit>



On Thu Nov 26, 2009 I made a post in the hidden moderator forum:

jacmoe wrote:OK. I have an idea, slightly crazy, but I think it's a good one. :wink:

Since we will face a larger task of updating the Ogre Wiki for Ogre 1.7 - both the build instructions and most, if not all, of the tutorials needs to be updated - why not grab the opportunity and move to something better? :)

My suggestion is to abandon MediaWiki - it's stictly aimed at WikiPedia use.
It's a pain in the behind to configure, the templates are awfully difficult to customize, and the plugin/addon configure/install leaves much to be desired.

The editing is not flexible, and you have to learn obscure syntax - it's just clunky.
And it doesn't really make information easy to find and organise.


Many posts later - and a lot of rambling from my side - Sinbad agreed to give me a dump of the Ogre MediaWiki pages, and told me to prove myself:

If I could make a convincingly better wiki, he'd consider it. :wink:
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Re: Proposal: New Ogre Wiki

Post by jacmoe »

IMO, MediaWiki is not really suited for our needs.

I won't start a discussion about that right now.

Instead I'll show you the alternative.

I settled on TikiWiki, mainly because of the decent MW importer, but certainly also because of it's features. :)

You are welcome to watch two screencasts I've made:

Ogre Wiki Screencast part I

Ogre Wiki Screencast part II

These are the first screencasts I've ever made, so be gentle. :wink:

The test wiki is at http://test.ogitor.org/tiki/ - you are welcome to visit it.
(The theme is begging for improvements, I know. I am not a design wizard)

<edit>
If the traffic kills my cheap host, I'll upload the screencasts somewhere else :wink:
</edit>
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newogrewiki.jpg
newogrewiki.jpg (60.06 KiB) Viewed 11245 times
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Re: Proposal: New Ogre Wiki

Post by jacmoe »

I'd love to hear what you think. :)
Brutal wrote:Never ceases to amaze me how much I dont see on the wiki no matter how many times I look through it.
Yes, that's one of the main reasons why I think we need a better, more manageable wiki.

We have so much quality content - let's make it clearly visible.

And, I keep hearing that our wiki is out of date, and that the tutorials needs updating.

What better way is there than tearing it all apart and build it anew? :)
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Re: Proposal: New Ogre Wiki

Post by jacmoe »

You are able to change your given vote.

And: Ogre Wiki Screencast part III is coming up - not today, though.

So don't judge it overall until you've watched that as well.
If you have the time to watch them, that is.
I know that many of you are busy, so thanks in advance to those of you who do watch them. :wink:
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Re: Proposal: New Ogre Wiki

Post by DanielSefton »

TikiWiki gets my vote from watching those screencasts. Looks great.

MediaWiki is "the obvious choice" - it's like a brand, you go with it just because of the name. Doesn't mean it's the best.

Pages literally get "lost" in MediaWiki, it's a nightmare to find what you need.

So, good call, IMO.
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Re: Proposal: New Ogre Wiki

Post by Brocan »

DanielSefton wrote:Pages literally get "lost" in MediaWiki, it's a nightmare to find what you need.
Agreed, i have lost tons of time looking for things without success, and later i found the article through a link in the forums...
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Re: Proposal: New Ogre Wiki

Post by Kojack »

Many posts later
It was a 7 page thread, and only about 8 posts weren't by jacmoe. :) :)
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Re: Proposal: New Ogre Wiki

Post by jacmoe »

:) I am sorry if it turned into a rambling mans weblog. :lol:

<edit>
I saved the best for screencast III, so watch out for that. :twisted:
</edit>
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Re: Proposal: New Ogre Wiki

Post by Vectrex »

Call me crazy but I'm hanging out for some Google Wave based solution. Realtime multiuser editing and simple plugin bots for formatting are way more suitable. In fact I really hope forums are also replaced by wave after the initial smoothing out of bugs/design. Forums really are pretty crappy (just look at the 200 PAGE threads). A realtime multiuser structured forum is the ideal combination of forums and irc. Plus a thread could very simply be marked and catagorised into the 'wiki' which would just be a filtered view of the 'forum'. Cleanly combining wiki/forums/irc.. ah I love elegant solutions :D
I've personally used wave with someone for our project and it is fantastic. We found a few little drawing bots and were having structured, editable design discussions.

I searched for wiki stuff and it seems there's already work being done on mediawiki wave editting. That sounds like a good stepping stone.
http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Prop ... ia_editing

I think tikiwiki would have something like that but I personally HATE wiki editing ;)
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Re: Proposal: New Ogre Wiki

Post by spacegaier »

As you can guess form all the work on the current wiki, you can guess that I really am a fan of the Ogre wiki and therefore I definetly like the idea, especially in combination with a major redesign / restructuring of the articles and a qualtiy check (concerning usefullness with current Ogre versions, grammar / seplling, layout, ...). I would also volunteer for these tasks.
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Re: Proposal: New Ogre Wiki

Post by jacmoe »

spacegaier wrote:seplling
seplling => spelling == fixed. :P

I've been meaning to do something about the wiki for a long, long time.
Even did a total MediaWiki based wiki makeover once, but it never took off.
Luckily, because it required over 14 MW plugins [s]in various states of decay[/s], and then it never really got any better.

<edit>
The good thing about Tiki is that it includes everything! :)
It's still modular, so you can turn on/off, configure all those features to fit your needs.

Besides: I've become a Tiki developer, and committed a new phpBB auth backend to the Tiki trunk, and a fix for an edit plugin as well.
</edit>

I feel that the new wiki environment gives us a set of useful tools to clean up/fix/improve the Ogre wiki.
It probably won't mean that we suddenly get a horde of new wiki editors, but it would make the current wiki editors job a lot easier. :)

The current state:
All the pages from the Ogre wiki has been imported.
Almost all of the links are working, and the content is there as well.
Very few pages were lost, due to the importer (it was a 2009 GSoC project :) ), and some of the pages were 'cut in half'.

While I worked hard at converting the pages to the new syntax - and search replace and the new box and div tags really makes this easy - a lot of pages still needs to be 'fixed'.

We are dealing with 2300 pages here! :)
If we disregard templates and talk pages, we are down to roughly 1000 pages.

Tiki has a lot of features making it easier to track our progress, and the overview is much better.

The editor might not be WYSIWYG, but it's as good as any html editor - the jQuery edit plugin dialogues really helps a lot.
You don't have to learn the syntax, if you don't want to. :)

I am working on screencast III - takes longer than I thought it would - but stay tuned. :wink:
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Re: Proposal: New Ogre Wiki

Post by jacmoe »

What happens now is that I'm going to keep it up to date by pulling in the updates made to the official Ogre wiki, until Ogre 1.7 is out the door.
Then - if you are not against it, of course - and Steve 'Sinbad' Streeting gives the green light - it would be the one and only Ogre Wiki.
If any of you wants to help keeping it synched to the Ogre wiki (the official) and maybe do some additional work, you are welcome to do so. :)
Send me a PM.
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Re: Proposal: New Ogre Wiki

Post by jacmoe »

Currently working on screencast part 3 ... :wink:
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Re: Proposal: New Ogre Wiki

Post by jacmoe »

The last screencast in the series is done:

Ogre Wiki Screencast part III

:)
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Re: Proposal: New Ogre Wiki

Post by jacmoe »

wrong link - hold on :wink: => fixed.

Comments would be appreciated - and questions.
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Re: Proposal: New Ogre Wiki

Post by betajaen »

I voted for "Don't care". I don't really like MediaWiki or from what I've seen of TikiWiki that either, I feel that wiki's are focused upon style and markup than content and semantics and much of the code is bloat with to many features. The wiki software at NxOgre is only 200 lines long in one file which supports image uploading, users and even a git based history repostiory; everything is cached to html files so it's quick to load and low impact on the server. It uses textile for cloth which means I can use an external editor (Textmate, E, sublime, etc.) to format wiki code for me rather than having the wiki software do it.

Don't get me wrong; I like your efforts Jacmoe, and I like what your doing with the current content of the wiki. I can appreciate how this will be easier for the wiki editors, but the theme really needs some work, the sidebar is too in your face and the line-height of the main text is too small making everything squished together. Also the links should be green like in the forum, otherwise with orange they look like that the page it is linked to isn't written yet. You should also make it hide some of the meta-data and statistical information for those who aren't logged in, it being read-only to them making them have access to viewing the source or contributor information - makes no sense.
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Re: Proposal: New Ogre Wiki

Post by jacmoe »

The links are Ogre frontpage orange, actually.. :wink:
Really depends on what you're used to - links to non-existing pages are not links in Tiki, which kind of makes sense; to me anyway. (It's a questionmark).

I [s]confessed[/s] said that the style needs some loving care - and since you're a wizard, you're more than welcome to help out. :P
<edit>I am not kidding: you are a designer *and* a programmer - rarely seen. :) </edit>
I am not even a decent BLOCKED..

Actually, I been thinking of a green-ish version of this:
WikiCO2.org

Yeah, I like textile.
But I don't think It'd make it easier and more manageable for a bigger wiki like the Ogre wiki. :)

I agree with you on the text size and the sidebar and all that, except that I do like the colour of the links.

I don't like the phpBB look, to be honest. :wink:

Maybe something like the wikiCO2 site, but using a green jQuery skin and an Ogre like background image.
That would be really nice.

By 'green' I mean keep the white, but change the orange.
Sort of like the lightness of the theme.
And the menus blends well.

<edit>
Actually, one could keep the css as is - I also like the fonts and the font colours.
Would actually be easy: change the background image to green, load a different jQuery theme, and done. :wink:
</edit>

But thanks for sharing your thoughts. :)

<another_edit>
But, it's a good thing that it's possible to switch themes.
</edit>
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Re: Proposal: New Ogre Wiki

Post by betajaen »

Why not use the existing style from the current Ogre wiki? You could even add in the green top bar to make it consistent, and it would provide the proper links to the main page, forums. Directly underneath; just borrow what the design from the forum with that lighter green bar with links related to the user and wiki control. It would be silly to come up with a new design when the current one is just as good.

The orange links have to go though, and increase that line-height! Brightly coloured links in wiki's always indicate that it's pointing to a page that isn't linked yet or in HTML red usually means a visited link. Also orange+white are a horrible colour combination on the eyes.
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Re: Proposal: New Ogre Wiki

Post by jacmoe »

betajaen wrote:Why not use the existing style from the current Ogre wiki?
Are you kidding? :)
betajaen wrote:You could even add in the green top bar to make it consistent, and it would provide the proper links to the main page, forums. Directly underneath; just borrow what the design from the forum with that lighter green bar with links related to the user and wiki control. It would be silly to come up with a new design when the current one is just as good.
I think you mean the forum?

IMO, it's not silly to come up with a new design, when neither the forum nor the MW wiki is good style.
betajaen wrote:The orange links have to go though, and increase that line-height! Brightly coloured links in wiki's always indicate that it's pointing to a page that isn't linked yet. Also orange+white are a horrible colour combination on the eyes.
Tell that to Sinbad! :P
I took the colour scheme from the main Ogre page.

I'll tweak the line-height, but to be honest: I am (almost) not sure where to find those in the style-sheets. :)

Luckily, as I said: it's possible to have multiple themes.
We do have different tastes.

And neither the MediaWiki nor the phpBB themes are likeable to me.

We could have a design contest.. :wink:

How do you like that CO2 theme, by the way?
Easy to read text, very light and modern. Wouldn't take much to Ogre'ify.
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Re: Proposal: New Ogre Wiki

Post by DanielSefton »

If betajaen had his way, the internet would be pure text :D

TikiWiki makes MediaWiki look like the stoneage.

It does look complicated though, especially if you're new to TikiWiki. So-many-features. :P

But, the wiki has grown into a mess with MediaWiki. I think the main problem is that people are creating pages of useful tibits randomly with no thought about the navigation, making them difficult to find, or even know to exist. TW looks easier to navigate, and seems to organise everything much better. The Wiki should be the holy grail of Ogre knowledge, and it's failing to fulfill that right now.

I don't think the style is an issue yet... We could easily change the look of the current wiki... The difference is the software :roll:
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Re: Proposal: New Ogre Wiki

Post by jacmoe »

Yeah, I agree. :)
It's a lot easier to put stuff into the new wiki.

And about the style: I've got myself a copy of the source for the CO2 site. It's using Tiki too, so it should be possible to Ogre-ify it.
I might need some help with the background image and a button or two... :wink:
Looks is important - especially a look which doesn't get in the way of the content.
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Re: Proposal: New Ogre Wiki

Post by jacmoe »

Wow, the CO2 style has Gimp source files as well - excellent!
I need a designer :)
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Re: Proposal: New Ogre Wiki

Post by reptor »

Why do you talk about colours when that's clearly not an important issue.

I think one key point has already been brought up and I want to emphasize it: it should be made easier to find information from a "wiki".

The structure is important. How do you present the information in a manner that does not look like some random group of people just vomited it up on the screen and left it like that. Unfortunately for this, the idea of a "wiki" is that a random group of people vomits stuff on a page and leaves it there...
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Re: Proposal: New Ogre Wiki

Post by jacmoe »

Feel free to keep your vomit to yourself, Reptor ...
<edit> Very poetic :) </edit>
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Re: Proposal: New Ogre Wiki

Post by jacmoe »

How about something like this? ->
niceTry.jpg
niceTry.jpg (110.09 KiB) Viewed 10930 times
Of course, the background needs to be green (the background, not the white areas, mind you) and be a gradient which covers most of the area, not only the top. Like the CO2 site.
Imagine that the buttons highlight green upon mouse hover, and that they open a submenu with the first level of the structure menus.

It's not perfect, yet. But it could be really good. I think.
If anyone with good Gimp skills and stylesheet knowledge could step forward? :)

I'll see if I can apply it to the test installation without tainting it too much.
Our idea is to leave Tiki untouched as much as possible to easy upgrades.
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