Re: What's New Pages

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Thu, 2010-03-04 at 13:10 -0600, Paul Cutler wrote:
> On Thu, 2010-03-04 at 10:06 -0600, Shaun McCance wrote:
> > Hi folks,
> > 
> > This is another half-baked idea in my brain.
> > 
> > "What's New" pages are really nice to have in application help.
> > Users who love the program love to look at a succinct list of
> > cool new things they can do.  So let's do them, yeah?
> > 
> > But how about we don't do them, and instead ask developers to
> > do them.  We'll put a page with a standard name (whatsnew.page)
> > in the help.  When the developers merge in cool new features,
> > they can just add a bullet point to this file.
> > 
> > <item><p>You can now frobnicate files!</p></item>
> > 
> > They'll forget sometimes, of course.   So at feature freeze we
> > send them a reminder to look at whatsnew.page and make sure it
> > has everything.
> > 
> > Developers don't need to write the final content.  They'd just
> > provide basic bullet points.  We'll go through their bullet
> > points, decide if we have to write new help because of them
> > (we probably do), and then make the "What's New" page shiny.
> > 
> > Does this sound like something we'd like to explore?
> > 
> > --
> > Shaun
> > 
> > 
> > _______________________________________________
> > gnome-doc-list mailing list
> > gnome-doc-list gnome org
> > http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-doc-list
> 
> Love it.  Devs are required to update new features for the release notes
> too, which will help as it is a similar process.

In the interest of reducing duplicate efforts, could release
notes writers just get the information from the "What's New"
pages?

And, you know, maybe if I got off my ass and got Blip running,
we could write a "What's New" plugin.  It would extract notes
from whatsnew.page files and show them all on a module's page.
And then it could aggregate them all together on a set's page.

--
Shaun