Re: What's New Pages

[Paul Cutler <pcutler gnome org>]

On Thu, 2010-03-04 at 13:25 -0600, Shaun McCance wrote:
> 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
> 
> 

Yes, there's no reason doc writers couldn't use the Release Notes
page[1].

My first thought too was "Man, Blip would be helpful for this!".

Paul

[1] http://live.gnome.org/ReleaseNotes