[Project] Community Documentation Effort

danielbowring

Hey,

It's no secret that the documentation for the ruby API has its problems. We've asked for problems to be fixed (and we had comments for a while!) but it seems the dev team is too busy with other things to maintain it (which, in-of-itself is a good thing - SketchUp improvements!)

So, I've started working on a community written API documentation. I've mostly decided on a style and layout, but before things are set in stone I'd like to have some input from other people.

The project is hosted on Github and is made of of two parts:

A Wiki to hold information on all the classes, modules, methods, ... as well as tutorials and guides
A repository for non-trivial examples and resources (such as images)

I'll be waiting a few days before I start the real effort so I can (hopefully) get some feedback from everyone. I suggest looking at the wiki page for UI, UI::WebDialog and UI::WebDialog#write_image for an example of each main "type" of page (module, class, method).

I know a lot of the information is scattered around already (especially here on these forums), but hopefully we can consolidate it into one, organised location.

mptak

Sounds like a good idea, especially the github part, but are there other efforts out there?

danielbowring

Only other one I'm aware of is JimFoltz's, but his doesn't allow the kind of stuff a wiki can.

Rich O Brien

That's a great idea. Is there a means of embedding that on a webpage here?

It would be a great reference point for people to get to.

tt_su

Just so you're aware, we're looking into new solution for the API docs. I don't know of any time frame, yet though.

danielbowring

@rich o brien said:

Is there a means of embedding that on a webpage here?

I doubt there will be any particular mechanism (as there is for gists) because of demand reasons.

danielbowring

@tt_su said:

Just so you're aware, we're looking into new solution for the API docs. I don't know of any time frame, yet though.

That's great! I'll continue working on this in the meantime, though. There's still a lot of community info to round-up and it may even come of use once you guys have whatever it is you're planning sorted.

Here's hoping you deprecate this soon

tt_su

Yea, when we get the new system up we need to review everything - and input from the users of the docs is valuable.

I got a couple of repositories myself with observer and webdialog bugs. Had to file them somewhere with some structure.

mptak

Anything that gets folk using git is a good thing. That cool sketch-up community empowered with the power of github would be incredible

tt_su

Yea, it would be good to see more community projects going.

matt.gordon320

I'm still (extremely) new to ruby scripting and Git, but I'd be happy to help where I can!