Suggestion: Wiki/Markdown-based system for less technical people to contribute.

[zolan]

I'm an engineer but more of a backend guy. I'm not great with frontend stuff. This thought came from a chat in VoidStar's #gridfinity chat room.

It started out as an idea to just add a 'beginners guide/things I wish I knew before I started' and evolved into, it would be nice if less technical people could add pages.

The two ways I see this are:

1. A 3rd party wiki that you can embed.
2. Do the horrible terrible thing I did for my site below.
3. Something I'm not thinking of because I'm not a web guy.

The horrible terrible thing I did on my website was a JavaScript system that loaded markdown files and, using a 3rd party library, formats the file appropriately. Example: https://www.zolan.org/dindex.html Loads https://www.zolan.org/index.md and applies the proper html/style. (Note: I also made a extra horrible terrible php implementation because search engines won't index sites that are pure javascript.)

Anyway, I am almost certainly that there is a better way to do this but the end goal.

Again, the whole impetus for this was to have a 'beginners page' but it ballooned into 'how can we make it easier for non-web people to contribute'.

Thank you for your consideration. If you think this is a terrible idea, feel free to decline/murder/destroy this request.

[DResthal]

Hey Zolan,

This is a great idea, however there's a tiny bit you probably aren't aware of. The site is built using Jekyll. Jekyll has built in, automatic page generation from .md files. Check this out. If you need some help getting started with Jekyll, their documentation on the start page is pretty simple and straight forward. You can also reach out to me if you need further help getting up and running, but the Jekyll team did a great job at covering this topic in as few words as possible while still hitting pretty much any major pain point (like using Ruby 3.0 and needing the webrick gem installed).

[zolan]

NeilClack,

Well, you are most certainly correct that I was unaware of this. 😄

Perhaps an alteration of this request would be simply altering the documentation for gridfinity-unofficial with, at the very least, a link to that Jekyll documentation and/or a quick example. I'm primarily concerned with making it as easy as possible for less technical people to contribute.

I won't be offended if you close this issue. If I happen to get free time, I may walk through this and push a patch for the documentation myself. We'll see.

Thanks for the response and educating me on this.

[DResthal]

I think you're right. I was shocked that the repo didn't have a general README to help people understand that this is a Jekyll project and how to contribute. I've been thinking about creating such a README, and I might, I just happen to not be so great at documentation myself.

[zolan]

I'm an engineer that actually enjoys writing documentation (I'm more elusive than a unicorn...). I just don't have the time at the moment. One way, one of us will get this done hopefully.

[DResthal]

@zolan, I made a pull request, with a stupid basic README that reads like a drunk person with ADHD wrote it, but it'll get us started.

Now just to find the maintainer and get these things merged...

Also Teach me your ways

[bepstein111]

I would also love some documentation. I just went to add a bunch of additional items to the catalog but I realized I have no clue how you're generating the ids for the items in the json list, and while everything else seems straightforward, are there any other things to keep in mind while adding new items?

[DResthal]

Maintainers seem to be actively working on the repo, but not responding to these comments, reviewing pull requests or merging them either. I've given up contributing and trying to reach the actual author through Github or Discord. Good luck friend.