[Zope-dev] Zope Book at ZopeWiki.org

[Chris McDonough]

On Thu, 2004-04-22 at 02:56, Chris Withers wrote:
> Any chance ZopeWiki.org could become the master location for the book?
> It's got a much nicer UI than Zope.org...

Every few weeks or so I go and clean out (sometimes hundreds of) "test"
and "fglrldjksjds" and "you suck!" comments in the BackTalk version of
the book and I'm tremendously thankful at that point that I don't need
to actually read the text to distinguish a comment from a "canonical"
part of the book, but I still have the comment in-situ to see its
context.

Before the Zope.org transition, I had configured the books to be
commentable only by authenticated users to make inane and content-free
comments harder for people to make, but it still happened.  When the
transition was done, it turned out that authentication was no longer
required, I didn't bother to turn it back on; I figured it's more
important to lower the bar for commenters in order to get the best
feedback possible anyway, so I just go clean it manually every so often
and keep the good parts.  It works pretty well, and I'm pretty happy
with BackTalk for this purpose.

Wikis are great for ad-hoc sorts of things but not so great when it's
useful to maintain a distinct level of separation between reader and
writer.  I can also generate a PDF of the book at will from the BackTalk
version, which I couldn't do (or at least I don't think I could do
easily) with ZWiki.  That said, I think zopewiki.org is a good thing and
I encourage folks to contribute.

If the Zope.org problems persist and I'm unable to find the time to fix
them, I will host the development of the book somewhere else, but it
will almost certainly be hosted with BackTalk.

- C