Revert to Old Style Wiki

A number of the pages in documentation.xojo.com force you over to the difficult to use developer.xojo.com (unless you use the History trick).

We want the original pages back first, and then hopefully a translation of the new framework docs into the much more user friendly Wiki format.

I feel like I’d be far more interested in the new framework if the documentation made sense and was easy to use.

Why did Xojo change this in the first place? Were people complaining about the old docs? I’ve always felt the docs have been pretty darn good.

Dito.

If the conversations went anything like the ones we had before switching to MediaWiki, the issue is that there are two kinds of documentation that simply do not blend together nicely: books and references.

MediaWiki is excellent at reference content. I mean, that’s what it was built to do. But it’s quite awful at sequential book-like content, like the User’s Guide.

The new developer site appears to be another attempt to find something that does both. I don’t know what software that is. I’m personally not a big fan of it, it feels too cluttered.

Xojo in this regard is stuck between a rock and a hard place. Their version of MediaWiki is highly modified, and still doesn’t tick all the boxes. I’m not sure how they feel about the new one, but the community seems to have rejected it. I think the answer today is the same as it was 6 years ago: build something custom. But we didn’t have the resources then, and I see no reason they’d have the resources now.

So it’s good to want better, but try not to give them a hard time about it. I’m sure they’re aware.

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it :confused:

Love this saying. If we had stuck with stone axes we wouldn’t have the issues we have today.

(Possibly completely unrelated but any way… )
Developer docs are hard by a key component. I spend most of my days here: http://docs.sencha.com/extjs/6.5.3/modern/Ext.html

Excellent docs and structure in my opinion. Easy to navigate and easy to search and filter. They also have two frameworks to document (classic and modern) All of the documentation is available for download in an offline folder structure that I have sitting on my system for day-to-day use.

14th now.

The last time this came up there was an argument by Xojo that they need the docs in PDF. Sorry, that’s 20th century. Nobody needs 1000s of pages as PDF.

Also, I agree that the quality of the new docs is way worse than the old wiki.

In matters of documentation, “innovations” often degrade the signal. I believe that is what happens with the new LR.

After years suffering with the inept documentation at Microsoft or Apple, I took the old wiki as a breath of fresh air. I frankly don’t think Xojo needed to invent yet another platform to support the new framework LR. And I frankly feel the frankensteinesque current mix is a huge mistake. I could live with the old wiki for classic and the new LR for the new framework, but the attempt to merge the two is horrid IMHO.