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

[From: Greg Morgan]

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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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