How to build a website to collect community documentation?
January 7, 2020 11:35 AM Subscribe
I'm a tech consultant focused on a specialized technology used by thousands of businesses and hobbyists. There is a lot of documentation about this technology, but it's spread across dozens of websites, wikis, ebooks, and youtube videos and is very poorly organized and of varying quality. I would like to build a site to help organize existing things and create a repository of community documentation. What web technologies make sense for this in 2020?
The primary feature I want is a set of "topic stream" pages that would collect all links to articles, videos, and products tied to a particular tag, with a quick description or preview. I don't want these pages to be hand written articles, ads would be light or nonexistent, and I want them to be easily googleable. I would pre-seed this site with my expertise, but would also want users to be able to add their own links and support comments and ratings by registered users. I would also want to support uploading full articles, or maybe just provide a linked wiki with some light integration. I would definitely need some basic anti-spam filtering. I suspect the best plan would be for me to modify an existing CMS or blog platform, but I'm out of date and don't know what the options are.
I have a lot of programming experience but only moderate web experience, and I plan on coding required modifications myself. I did something similar to this 15 years ago in PHP and hated it, so I'm open to any modern C#/Python/Ruby/Javascript/Java platform. Are there existing open source or easily modifiable commercial platforms I should look into using as a foundation, or will I probably have to write most of this from scratch?
The primary feature I want is a set of "topic stream" pages that would collect all links to articles, videos, and products tied to a particular tag, with a quick description or preview. I don't want these pages to be hand written articles, ads would be light or nonexistent, and I want them to be easily googleable. I would pre-seed this site with my expertise, but would also want users to be able to add their own links and support comments and ratings by registered users. I would also want to support uploading full articles, or maybe just provide a linked wiki with some light integration. I would definitely need some basic anti-spam filtering. I suspect the best plan would be for me to modify an existing CMS or blog platform, but I'm out of date and don't know what the options are.
I have a lot of programming experience but only moderate web experience, and I plan on coding required modifications myself. I did something similar to this 15 years ago in PHP and hated it, so I'm open to any modern C#/Python/Ruby/Javascript/Java platform. Are there existing open source or easily modifiable commercial platforms I should look into using as a foundation, or will I probably have to write most of this from scratch?
A wiki could do this kind of thing, and would be a good choice if the articles need to be revised over time. Rocwiki.org is an example of a community-led wiki. If the articles will remain primarily static, then WordPress or another blogging engine (maybe Tumblr?) would work fine, too.
posted by Wild_Eep at 12:53 PM on January 7, 2020
posted by Wild_Eep at 12:53 PM on January 7, 2020
Response by poster: I thought about wiki software, but I haven't really seen a good "Dynamic list item" on them like I would want with the preview, ratings, etc. RocWiki looks well organized the but the lists are just plain text and manually edited it looks like.
Yeah will definitely look into modifying Wordpress proper, I've only used it for proper blogs before so I'll have to look into plugins and such I imagine
posted by JZig at 1:15 PM on January 7, 2020
Yeah will definitely look into modifying Wordpress proper, I've only used it for proper blogs before so I'll have to look into plugins and such I imagine
posted by JZig at 1:15 PM on January 7, 2020
If this is going to be a repository of scattered-but-already-available materials, most people will come to it via search engines. So the UX doesn't matter as much as the content and persistence of your archive. Also:
posted by scruss at 1:44 PM on January 7, 2020
- make sure every document/page/archive is archived on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine
- even very basic Tesseract (free) OCR on scanned PDFs turns them from unfindable blobs to useful documents
- make sure your internal links are simple <a href="…"> ones and not hidden under javascript
- never change internal links, ever
- allow/expect/encourage mirroring
- secure funding for long-term hosting.
posted by scruss at 1:44 PM on January 7, 2020
curated anchor tags with good descriptions?
posted by j_curiouser at 2:51 PM on January 7, 2020
posted by j_curiouser at 2:51 PM on January 7, 2020
You could do this pretty easily with Tumblr, and keep it updated as new resources come online by either editing a post or adding a new posts. You can keep the posts organized by tagging them, and show links to the various tags in the navigation of the site.
Tumblr also allows you to accept Submissions* and style the site with a wide array of themes. You can have a technologyguide.tumblr.com address or use a custom domain as you like.
Hope it helps!
*The submissions go to a queue which you would moderate.
posted by wowenthusiast at 10:42 AM on January 8, 2020
Tumblr also allows you to accept Submissions* and style the site with a wide array of themes. You can have a technologyguide.tumblr.com address or use a custom domain as you like.
Hope it helps!
*The submissions go to a queue which you would moderate.
posted by wowenthusiast at 10:42 AM on January 8, 2020
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posted by DarlingBri at 12:21 PM on January 7, 2020