was docmint.net
was https://sourceforge.net/projects/docmint/
Docmint was a CMS for making online manuals. I reviewed it briefly as a candidate for Unity Linux‘s online guidebook.
It’s unusable.
At a glance ∞
- No page-editing functions when logged as the admin.
- Once a few files exist, the ‘edit article’ view is flat. This is horrifying.
- Missing accesskeys.
- No document workflow.
- With wiki enabled, cannot make links and have them point to the nonexistent page, for easy page creation.
- With wiki enabled, there’s no preview.
- No article revisioning system.
-
Wow, the documentation for Docmint itself.. is bad.
Right away I can say that Docmint is unusable.
The process for editing ∞
Unless I’m missing something, it is:
- View the page I want to edit
- Open a new tab and visit the admin mode
- Visit the editing module
- See a flat list of pages, alphabetically-sorted
- Find the page I want to edit, edit it
- Make my changes, save it
-
Return to the view and refresh. Review it and make more edits as necessary.
If that looks reasonable to you, please imagine having n-1 documents. Am I expected to use search features or control-f to manually find my page? That’s insanity. It’s already too many clicks to get into editing a page.
What I am expecting is ∞
- View the page I want to edit
- Click ‘edit’
- Make changes
- Click ‘preview’
-
Make changes as necessary, and preview again or save
Additionally, a proper workflow system would add some additional steps.
How could I make life easier? ∞
Well it looks like I may be able to hack my way to a solution. A bookmarklet could be made which modifies the URL like so:
example.com/index.php?id=3 => example.com/admin.php?&ACTION=Content_Edit&content_id_select=3
Since this solves my primary issue, I could look more deeply into functionality.
- How does it handle edit collisions? It doesn’t look like it has a revisioning system at all.
- Can it be bound into an offline-navigable handbook? It doesn’t look that way.
-
Can it be exported to PDF or other formats? I see there’s an XML import, so perhaps that’s workable, but there’s nothing built in.
I think at this point Docmint is on pretty shaky ground. I’m not sure what Docmint is bringing to the table that isn’t covered elsewhere, and I’d bet that most of my grievances would be solved by a mature CMS.
Some issues ∞
A definition list should have it’s first item bolded ∞
; bolded : regular
is displayed as:
bolded
regular
I am expecting:
bolded
regular
<?wiki ∞
-
When wiki is turned on by default, but the
<?wikisyntax is still used, a title as the first line is not formatted and the end?>still appears:
<?wiki == This title isn't formatted == ?>
is displayed as
This title isn’t formatted
?>
I am expecting:
<h2>This title isn't formatted</h2>
