Unified Info for Noobies? Wiki?

draftomatic

I was wondering if anyone had thought of a better way to get information out there for new plugin developers. There is a huge learning curve, in particular for working effectively with WebDialogs, and the info, while mostly available, is scattered across several websites (sketchucation, the google group, and the api doc comments).

Would it make sense to start a SketchUp plugin developers wiki? I personally have tons to contribute after writing a fairly large plugin (still unreleased except to a few beta customers), but haven't written a large guide on WebDialogs myself because I fear it will just get buried in the almost unsearchable Sketchucation forums.

In particular I think people need to learn how to package plugins in a reasonable way (wrapping webdialogs, dealing with action callbacks and, in general, the ruby<->javascript exchange, in a civilized fashion, and packaging plugins into correct directory structures with correct module wrapping).

Dan Rathbun

Agree that a forum engine is not the best way.

We already have a ton of "info" topics on here that could be that would be better pasted into a wiki.
But I'd prefer some access control, with say 3 guru approvals to publish updates.

I would also prefer the wiki hosted here at SCF. TBD? Anyone know of a good wikiengine SCF could use?

We have attempted to provide some indexing to code samples, but yes it's not the same as a wiki-like tutorial.

jolran

Yes, please.

I speak for myself, but I think it is needed. Especially Step by step tutorials.

Spent last months learning JS and the "webparts". But doesen't do diddley if one don't know how to communicate with Sketchup properly.

tbd

funny thing, I was thinking the same last night. need to think about it though.

what we need is a list of features that you want implemented, here are some of mine:

step by step tutorials
realtime try of ruby/webdialog code along the tutorial
gallery of existing open sourced projects
easy to update, something like pull requests from github
good search (that allow less then 3 letter query)
voting for new features
... add yours

thomthom

That sounds good. Though, might be good to start simple, just so that it doesn't get so complex it'll never finish. (I've been there soooo many times... )