[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] maemo-apps.org application catalog

[From: VLG]

It seems that GTK community (as well as KDE) had faced at some point
similar problems - their solution was GnomeFiles (KDE Apps)
(http://gnomefiles.org/index.php, http://www.kde-apps.org/).

-Vlad

On Sat, 2006-09-30 at 05:24 -0700, Greg Morgan wrote:
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> Siarhei Siamashka wrote:
> > Hello All,
> > 
> > What do you think about current wiki based application catalog? In my
> > opinion, it is quite a large page already, slow to open and hard to
> > navigate. A
> <snip>
> > 
> > Thoughts?
> 
> Maemo is a growing community.  In some ways I see Maemo experiencing the
> same things that happened to the Fedora effort.  Red Hat wanted to
> involve the community just like Nokia is doing.  They did not create a
> forum and wiki right away so someone else did.  Eventually a community
> evolves solving some of the problems.  Maemo is spread out.  The garage
> was a great idea of Nokia's to try an pull all those applications into
> one location as developers get used to the idea.  Some developers like
> to have their own sites so you will never see them join the garage.  The
> wiki application page was a good solution to collecting all these far
> flung resources and applications.  Now that there are a larger number of
> applications the catalog needs to evolve too as you mention.
> 
> Here are a number of ways to evolve the catalog.  Some of these help me
> solve these problems for myself as a Nokia 770 user.
> 
> 1.)  When a wiki is young it is just good to "throw" content out there
> in order to seed pages for the community to work on.  It encourages
> others to say on this is started I can add some of my knowledge to it.
> There's enough content now in the Maemo wiki that categories need to be
> applied to some of the pages.  You can see a list here
> http://maemo.org/maemowiki/CategoryCategory .  One of the benefits that
> the categories provides is a self maintaining list of pages.  All you
> have to do is add one or more categories to a page and it is
> automatically in the list(s).  For example, the Flasher page,
> http://maemo.org/maemowiki/Flasher_tool_usage , has two categories,
> CategoryFlashing CategoryHowToMisc.  When someone clicks on the
> CategoryFlashing link of the Flasher_tool_usage page, then you can see
> all the related pages that have been classified the same way as shown
> here http://maemo.org/maemowiki/CategoryFlashing .  You see it would be
> much easier to add a Misc link to the CategoryHowToMisc page, on the
> HowTo page http://maemo.org/maemowiki/CategoryHowToMisc , than to
> maintain the individual links as it is presently done on the HowTo page,
> http://maemo.org/maemowiki/HowTo .  So far I just have the Misc section
> categorized and the other how to categories created.
> 
> 2.) Even with the categorized pages, a list of applications needs to be
> maintained to locate all the available applications.  There are some
> problems with this idea too.  This page would just have wiki page names
> on it.  Here's an example that I can show you on another wiki I hack on
> http://phpwebsite-comm.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php?title=Third_Party_Themes
> . The Third Party Themes page has a list of a similar project with far
> flung resources.  A new user can come to this page and "shop" for either
> free or cost themes for their content management system.
> 
> 3.)  The problem that Siarhei points out is that the catalog page is too
>  slow to load.  Item 2 above points to a solution for resolving this
> problem.  The wiki detailed content that is now on the main application
> page can be cut and pasted into individual pages.  At first just the
> initial content from the main page can be cut and pasted into a new
> page.  For example, AppOssoXterm would be used for the ossoxterm
> application.  The leading App would help prevent other page name
> conflicts, etc. in the Maemo wiki.  Here are two example pages from the
> other wiki
> http://phpwebsite-comm.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php?title=Default
> http://phpwebsite-comm.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php?title=Colors .
> Note that both the pages follow a similar template. An application
> template can be developed for the Nokia application pages.  In fact, the
> current Maemo catalog page has the rough outline of what each individual
> page should contain.  Note two things that I am starting to do with the
> Colors page.  I have created a category so that a person can shop by a
> theme author.  Example,
> http://phpwebsite-comm.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php?title=Category:En_author_Sharondippity
> . Second, this catalog is getting so large that maintaining the theme
> catalog is becoming a core.  It looks like it is about time to replace
> the hand maintained page with the category page
> http://phpwebsite-comm.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php?title=Category:Third_Party_Themes_Other
> .  Ahhh but I am waiting to do that until all the individual theme pages
> are categorized.  I alluded to this maintenance problem in item 2.
> 
> The advantage that this solution provides is a flexible database that
> others can freely add to in the wiki style of edit this page.  All the
> major words are indexed by the MoinMoin wiki engine.  In addition, the
> major web search engines also index the content in the wiki.  In the
> future, the style of the "application database" can be changed as new
> features arise.  The database is located on the central maemo.org site, etc.
> 
> One fruitful discussion that can start from this thread is what kinds of
> attribute information needs to go into the application catalog.  This is
> true regardless of what final solution is selected.
> 
> Regards,
> Greg
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