PfSense Community-Led Documentation Initiative
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Hello everybody,
First of all I'd like to introduce myself to the pfSense community. I have been using pfSense for about 8 months at home, and am now implementing at work. It is a wonderfully packaged system and I'd like to thank the developer(s?) and the community for their work on it.
I have been using this forum as a resource for as long as I have been using pfsense, and it is a great resource. The only area that I can see that needs some serious attention is the documentation wiki. It seems to be very scattered and disorganized, with part of it directed to the m0n0wall docs, part of it in the pfSense docs, and part of it directed to the forum.
I'm proposing that we help out the devs by organizing the pfSense documentation and centralizing it in the pfSense wiki. The forums and the mailing list are an excellent way to solve problems, ask about bugs, and in general, clear things up very quickly, as both resources are very active. The docs seem neglected compararatively, though. I think it would further improve the forums and the mailing list if we did this, by reducing the need for people to ask the oft-asked questions. Our job is made simple by us having a wiki to do this. If any of you have a lot of experience with pfSense, but are not accustomed to editing wiki's, we might even think about making a wiki editing howto.
I've seen this work very well in both the gentoo and ubunut communities, and I think it can greatly help this commuinity. Let's discuss this here and if the community and the pfSense team considers this to be a good idea, we can accept volunteers for this project right here. As a side note, if this takes off, a sticky may be a good idea.
Regards,
JP
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Bump?
Is this in the wrong section? I'd love to hear what you all think about this…
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We (the pfsense team) would be quite happy to see people helping out with documentation. We encourage any work that is done in that section. :)
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Good to know! I guess the next step is to start taking volunteers for this project.
I'll be the first, any more?
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I'm proposing that we help out the devs by organizing the pfSense documentation and centralizing it in the pfSense wiki.
That's a fine idea, and i'd tinker here and there - but we need a Wiki. We need an actual site where we can edit a wiki.
Right now there is a FAQ that's hosted using phpMyFAQ, which nobody can edit. The forum is powered by SMF. And tutorials are hosted in PDFs.
There's no Wiki site using the Wiki engine that people can freely edit and contribute.
So until someone downloads MediaWiki, hosts it on a server, and points the pfSense homepage to it - a documentation project isn't going to get very far.
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It's there and has been for a long time: http://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Main_Page ;-)
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It's there and has been for a long time: http://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Main_Page ;-)
Yes, that is the wiki I was referring to in my original post. Isn't there an "old docs" that much of the old documentation used to be on, as well?
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yes (http://olddoc.pfsense.org/index.php/Main_Page), but any work should go to the new one.
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Definitely. The reason I asked was that we'll probably need to merge any remaining (if still correct) documentation from olddoc into the main docs wiki.
It might be good to still have available any information that only applies to older versions. Perhaps the first two places to go from the main page could be major version numbers. I'm not really sure what info is considered too dated to be included into the currecnt documentation, but I'm sure it exists (and I'm sure I'll learn what info applies to what version, intentionally or not).
I'm just brainstorming here. The easier systems to maintain are those that are logically organized, so I'm trying to figure out the best way to do this.
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It's there and has been for a long time: http://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Main_Page ;-)
Okay, step one is done. Step two is providing a link to this wiki on the homepage.
And why is wiki.pfsense.com not a wiki for pfSense, but a developer wiki for pfSense?
And the link on the homepage to documentation points to a wiki that is no longer there, redirecting to a dev wiki.You know what - just erase everything and start again.
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Sorry all, haven't abandoned this, I just have the flu right now…
I should be jumping back on this in a few days, but in the meantime some suggestions and other input woulld be great!
-JP