Just Added: Documentation Wiki
“StikiPad looks kinda nice,” I said last week when asked if I’d had an opportunity to check it out, “but I f**king hate wikis.”
It’s true, I generally am opposed to wikis — I’m enough of a control freak that I prefer to have something that’s totally under my control. But I’ll say this about a wiki: it’s perfect for a living or in-progress document like the Friendly API docs. And I’ll say this about StikiPad: it’s a fantastic hosted wiki app — I’d go so far as to call it the wiki software for people who hate wikis. It’s got two features in particular that caught my eye:
Domain Mapping (so StikiPad-hosted wikis can appear to live on the same domain as the rest of one’s website)
Custom Templates using Liquid, a lovely little template engine not dissimilar from our own Smarty.
I’d been evaluating a couple of ways to go about building the API docs for Friendly, including a PHP-based solution called MediaWiki (the same stuff that powers Wikipedia) and (of course) just building a small CMS using Friendly. But MediaWiki doesn’t offer as much flexibility of design as I would like, and from what I hear it’s seriously resource-hungry. And building something would be a lovely example of the framework in action, but I’ve got some serious workload at the moment and building something from scratch would only serve to delay getting these API docs written and published.
So if you click on the Documentation tab of this site, you’ll find that it now points to the Friendly PHP Wiki, where there is actually some useful content. (Gasp!!!)
What’s there is pretty sparse, but I plan to continue adding to it as I work on Friendly, with a goal of having a more-or-less complete reference to the current API by the time I’m pushing 1.0d2 out the door in the next 3-4 weeks.