[epo-core] List of supported projects

[J. Shirley]

On Mon, Sep 15, 2008 at 9:54 AM, Mark Keating
<mdk at shadowcatsystems.co.uk> wrote:
> I want a new page on the website that explicitly states the projects we are
> aimed at supporting/promoting and i think we should compile a list so that I
> can put appropriate links - this would be the first stage towards us
> choosing the first project - which my vote is for some docsw for one of the
> things we are listing, perhaps we could offer the first 'grant' to be some
> cool bit of merchandice (unique Ts) for those who participate on the
> writing.
>
> I will start, please join in as quick as possible:
>
> Catalyst
> Moose
> DBIx::Class
> Reaction
>
> Join in people...
>
> Also I think that jshirley's idea of cpan.iusethis is stunningly good so
> Marcus what are your thoughts on this and how much is it going to cost/how
> difficult to set up? And are there any objections (Penfold, JShirley and I
> are all voting yes to this if it is possible - from last thread).
>
> Ta
>
> Mark
>
> --
> Mark Keating BA (Hons)              |  Writer, Photographer, Cat-Herder
> Managing Director                   |  Shadowcat Systems Limited
> Director/Secretary                  |  Enlightened Perl Organisation
> http://www.shadowcat.co.uk          |  http://www.enlightenedperl.org
> http://linkedin.com/in/markkeating  | 'Sufficiently Advanced Technology'
>
>


I would propose development of a pod-book system.  I hacked up a proof
of concept that simply parsed a YAML file to establish relations
between pod, and generate out a tree, it was incredibly ugly and not
quite finished but easy enough to work on.  Uses TT to render from
Pod::POM, pretty basic.

Originally I was looking at using MojoMojo, and linking the pod that
way, but then I'd want to have wiki edits commit back to the pod
source, and that may not be ideal (and grows the access list
requirements, and other "burdens" that I didn't want to go down; plus
it would require MojoMojo.

After that, then I think that grants should go forward with the
documentation.  One thing that consistently bothers me is that perl
information is nearly offensive to new people.  Pod is great for
reference material, but as a consolidated guide/book/tutorial it
starts to get a bit rough.  The Catalyst tutorial is probably the best
effort I've seen, but it is very very manual to establish the links.
If you wanted to insert a chapter, you'd have to edit all the other
pod files, etc.

I think having the "sugar" around Pod would make the documentation
effort much more productive in the long run.

Here's the start of my ideas here, it needs a way of snipping out the
excerpt for top leve "Table of Content" preview pages but aside from
that can parse most of the nodes.  The templates can be modified
easily, with look'n'feel.

http://dev.catalystframework.org/repos/Catalyst/branches/site-notrac/podbuilder/

Now... after saying that, I'm not in a position to take on the work to
finalize and package a product but I'm happy to guide as much as I
can.  I simply don't have a lot of time, and until the baby is born
and things settle from that, I can't commit to any other efforts.  So,
this is an opinion without any work effort that can really go into it,
so feel free to value it accordingly.

-J