[publican-list] Open Feedback Publishing System (OFPS)

[David Jorm]

I eagerly await Rudi's publican brand creation tech talk so I can get the skills to proof of concept this :)

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jeff Fearn" <jfearn at redhat.com>
To: "Publican discussions" <publican-list at redhat.com>
Sent: Friday, October 22, 2010 12:40:37 PM GMT +10:00 Brisbane
Subject: Re: [publican-list] Open Feedback Publishing System (OFPS)

On Thu, 2010-10-21 at 02:19 -0400, David Jorm wrote:
> I wouldn't change that design constraint to support this, but publican could provide the capability to link in to external feedback-capturing mechanisms. Off the top of my head, one approach would be to conditionally allow books to be configured as feedback=mechanism, where mechanism is a pluggable option. For Red Hat use, we could build a bugzilla feedback extension, which would inject code into the output (probably just for html) allowing you to leave feedback for a particular chapter/section. This would be static output, providing a deep link into bugzilla with the appropriate component, version etc. to match the book filled out. Plugins could be developed for any other feedback mechanism people want to use.
> 
> David
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Jeffrey Fearn" <jfearn at redhat.com>
> To: sparks at fedoraproject.org, "Publican discussions" <publican-list at redhat.com>
> Sent: Thursday, October 21, 2010 4:03:31 PM GMT +10:00 Brisbane
> Subject: Re: [publican-list] Open Feedback Publishing System (OFPS)
> 
> Eric "Sparks" Christensen wrote:
> > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> > Hash: SHA1
> > 
> > Jared pointed out a neat "feature" O'Reilly is trying out called Open
> > Feedback Publishing System (OFPS)[1].  This allows readers to leave
> > comments on a particular paragraph of a document.
> > 
> > Contrary to its name, OFPS is NOT open source.  There are other projects
> > that are open source that do the same thing.  The one I saw listed was
> > called Wooki[2].
> > 
> > I'm wondering if something similar could be implemented within Publican
> > to be used, at a minimum, in our draft documentation.  It might make it
> > easier for people to let us know of problems without filing a bug.
> > Because it would take less time to leave feedback we might find that we
> > receive more than we currently do through BZ.
> > 
> > [1] http://labs.oreilly.com/ofps.html
> > [2] http://wookicentral.com
> 
> One of the founding constraints to Publican design is that there is no 
> server side scripting. I don't see how you could do this without doing 
> server side scripting and processing of some kind. It would require a 
> major change in direction for Publican to become a web service instead 
> of a static content provider.

I don't think this addresses what Eric was asking for. In the case of
interactive systems like OFPS or Wooki, I think it would be better for
those kind of tools to use publican at the back-end instead of trying to
integrate publican in to their front end; or implementing such a system
from scratch specifically for Publican use. Similar to how Transifex can
handle Publican's directory structure, so we don't have to expend a lot
of effort trying to make one.

I haven't seen any discussions about a plugin architecture, how it would
work, or what it would do, so I don't have any position on that.

Overriding the output is easy to do at the brand level, if there was a
brad implementing this then we could look at how it works and decide
whether and how best to integrate it in to Publican, or even if it's
more appropriate to try and get it in to the upstream DocBook XSL as XSL
function calls, similar to how highlighting and call-outs work.

Cheers, Jeff.

-- 
Jeff Fearn <jfearn at redhat.com>
Software Engineer
Engineering Operations
Red Hat, Inc
Freedom ... courage ... Commitment ... ACCOUNTABILITY

Sure our competitors can rebuild the source but can they engage the customer the same way? -wmealing

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