Spreading the word about D

[Chris R. Miller]

Yigal Chripun wrote:
> Walter Bright wrote:
>> Yigal Chripun wrote:
>>> The community is willing to take that job on itself. That'll improve
>>> many aspects of the site without any work on your part. you can continue
>>> to work on DMD without troubling yourself with maintaining a website.
>>> isn't it a win-win situation for all of us? all we need is your approval
>>> Also, a community site can have several maintainers which can split the
>>> work among themselves and delegate some of the work to the community at
>>> large (like submitting code examples, articles, etc to the site).
>>>
>>> This can be a huge step forward for D.
>> How would that be different from a wiki?
> 
> Personally I hate wikis. I really don't see a point for their existence.
> They do not add anything new accept a non standard syntax. Why should I
> bother to learn a new syntax when I already know [x]html? besides, what

Because when the Wiki engine interprets the wiki code it generates html 
that renders (mostly) the same on every platform, without having to 
embed javascript if(platform = ie6) { then do this } else if (platform = 
ie7) { then do that } all over the place.

> if you want to switch to a different wiki system in the future with a
> different syntax? all those wiki systems basically reinvented html, and
> I prefer to use the standard, original and more flexible format.
> besides, CMS systems provide a WYSIWYG editor for html, so you don't
> even need to learn html to add content to the site.

I've worked with html-based wikis before, and they're a holy load of 
crud.  The most advanced web-based HTML editor I have seen is MCE, and 
that stinks - really bad.  Doesn't render correctly on different 
browsers, etc.  Some of my friends were so ticked off at it on the FSDEV 
site that I eventually took the 3 days of server downtime to migrate to 
Redmine, which is a much nicer wiki (renders the same on all browsers, etc).

> I think it'd be better to use a system that uses html or xml or any
> other standard file format for content of the site. that way, if in the
> future there's a need to switch to a different system, there'll be no
> need to convert all the content to a different syntax.

Unless it uses filtered html, or it uses a wiki syntax of its own.  Many 
different wiki systems have their own converters to translate between 
different wiki syntaxes, which can greatly ease the pains of moving 
between systems.

> Besides, real CMSs have many more features than a wiki and are
> extensible with plugins: you can have anything from a site with just
> static content to a web application with an online store, an online
> photo gallery, etc.

A system like Drupal can function (somewhat) as both a wiki and a CMS. 
I fear for the source code highlighter, however, since I don't remember 
Drupal having support for D, which is why I was leaning towards 
something Python based, since Pygments already works quite well (it's 
what powers dsource, actually).

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