My blog is defunct. You can find me on twitter, but I don’t think I’ll be blogging anymore. Everything I write these days is much longer in form, and the blogging format is too stale for me. I also feel like I don’t have too much interesting to say.

Anyway…

The advantages of Sphinx over Plone (for the MapServer community) are:

- Docs are in svn. Almost all of our document writing folks have svn access. They know how to use these tools. They don’t have to learn anything new to write docs.

- Anyone can build the docs and see them locally.

- A static website doesn’t need as much administrative tending.

- A static website doesn’t need as much computing horsepower.

- Trac can fill our role for a community website / wiki (we didn’t have this before the Plone site was developed)

- Administration and development of the website no longer has to go through the Plone expert(s). Some simple templating, some Python code, and ‘make’ are all that are needed to build the new website.

re: 0.6. We’re running that on http://mapserver.osgeo.org because of a number of PDF/LaTeX fixes. For HTML generation, there’s no significant difference right now.

I just wonder how collaboration to the docs will be handled with a tool that’s designed for documentation as opposed to a mediawiki or a Plone that are designed for collaborative authorship. In a broader “collaborative platform”, what’s the role of Sphinx ?

For example, the Grok folks have a Plone site (http://grok.zope.org/) for their home and a Sphinx docs section for the current docs (http://grok.zope.org/doc/current/). Anyhow, I’m eager to read the rationale behind the move.

Cheers,

Yves

Certainly a lightweight and smart approach to managing documentation. I think when the next documentation / website revamp takes place, it will be much easier given we have stuff in rST pure now.

Cheers,

Yves Moisan

Cheers,
Steko