Call for more technical Documentation

[blokje]

Dear Developers,

At first, congratulations with your great product called 'Zabbix', as you all are aware of you have a nice community backing you up and supporting you all. It is that this community contains people throughout all the ranges of professional IT, from Administrators to Developers. As for both parties it would be interesting to see more Technical documentation. As this is currently missing for quite some features. It would be nice to see the following documents to be published.

Specification of import/export XML - This will help people greatly when dealing with switches
Specification of zabbix protocol - Especially the developers would appreciate it if they can build in native zabbix support in their applications
Specification of the database - A great help if you are trying to debug or create custom reports directly from the database.
Specification of log files - See : http://zabbix.com/forum/showthread.php?t=3563
I hope you can deliver such documents in the near future as I think it would really help us (me especially ;-)) to debug, extend and managing Zabbix.

[Alexei]

We are looking forward to having Zabbix documentation online with user comments. Media-wiki style or something similar with PDF export would be nice. One PDF document is nice (is it is now), however I do not think it is easy to read.

[blokje]

There is already a wiki ;-)

We are looking forward to having Zabbix documentation online with user comments. Media-wiki style or something similar with PDF export would be nice. One PDF document is nice (is it is now), however I do not think it is easy to read.

Alexei,

I appreciate your quick response :-)

The current PDF document is not really a manual style book for me. But still it is easy to read as a reference guide. Technical guys like us never start with manuals do we ;-).

Still the wiki is already there. Who needs PDF basically if the print CSS is good enough. What are the plans to update the wiki with the requested information?

Looking forward for your response

[Alexei]

Still the wiki is already there. Who needs PDF basically if the print CSS is good enough. What are the plans to update the wiki with the requested information?

Current Zabbix Wiki is not good enough for keeping and maintaining documentation. We have already tried this. It just does not work.

We are looking for a solution (Wiki, something else, does not matter), which would allow maintaining of the online documentation, user input, as well as easy creation of tutorials and user content.

I would appreciate any suggestions! Perhaps there are other OSS projects around, which maintain documentation in a much nicer way. Please give us a pointer.

[blokje]

Current Zabbix Wiki is not good enough for keeping and maintaining documentation. We have already tried this. It just does not work.

We are looking for a solution (Wiki, something else, does not matter), which would allow maintaining of the online documentation, user input, as well as easy creation of tutorials and user content.

I would appreciate any suggestions! Perhaps there are other OSS projects around, which maintain documentation in a much nicer way. Please give us a pointer.

My first suggestion would be Trac :-)
- Wiki
- SVN Browser
- Roadmap
- Tickets

A small search on freshmeat.net revealed the following applications which looks nice at first look

http://www.knowledgeroot.org/

http://www.sitellite.org/ http://freshmeat.net/projects/siteforge

Else I would suggest asking members of the community to help you guys out with a new wiki, suggesting a wikimedia approach with moderators who actively check for changes on the wiki and moderate them appropriately


Just some suggestions but than again `whoami`

[rue]

Reminds me of a track (30min) I saw at Bern OpenExpo, about how apache.org organizes itself, including documentation, bug tracking etc.:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdNyzNCRLd8&feature=PlayList&p=EFDB5FCB61DC9CCF&index=3

Seems to work for them ... .

have fun!

Rü