I ask many questions in this forum and I’m learning a lot. Though the helpful answers quickly becomes obscure in the forum and lost. I wonder it would be easier if PlayCanvas would prepare an official multi-language Wiki space so that we can create and search HowTo articles to help each other.
I understand organizing such community Wiki requires certain amount of effort from PlayCanvas team. I don’t know how many people would join. But if it goes well and grows, that will help all of us. At least I can contribute by writing a step by step article about how to make this.
Hi Nakata-san. There have been quite a few conversations about the best way for the community to interact and share information. As you know, we currently have the forum and the answers site. Personally, I feel that the answers site has a few problems: it doesn’t use the same sign in as your PlayCanvas account (so usernames are not guaranteed to be the same) and the general performance of the site is not good. However, I think it is a good resource for PlayCanvas developers. The forum is a lot more informal and free-form. I prefer spending my time chatting here than spending time answering stuff on the answers site. So perhaps there’s an argument for dropping the answers site - we’ve also considered encouraging people to post questions on stackoverflow instead with the playcanvas tag.
You’re suggesting adding yet another learning resource. It worries me a bit because I feel like the existing combination of the forum and answers is already maybe too much.
I wonder whether we could maybe add a HOWTO section to the developer.playcanvas.com site (we already have a Tutorials section of course). I’m not sure you know but:
So you are welcome to get involved in that project.
In many ways, it’s already is a bit like a Wiki in that people are free to contribute content. It’s just that, currently, it needs to go via pull requests on GitHub. The other thing we’d want to encourage is that content has an English translation with other languages being optional.
In case you’re wondering how we translate the developer site, we use something called Transifex. Check out the PlayCanvas project here.
I agree about the forum. This forum has lower barrier than the answers site. I wondered which site should I use but I ended up with asking bunch of questions here.
Using GitHub to maintain community developer site is an interesting approach. It’s naturally version controlled and you already have solid integration with translation workflow. Pull request will provide solid review process. Let me take a look. As for translation, I’m already a part of translation team. I translated Cocoon publishing user manual section during lunch break today. I’m impressed by how easy to join the translation.
My concern about the git based website management model is the barrier before making contribution. In this model, when you want to contribute an article, the contributer has to understand…
How clone and pull request on git works and install git client
How to use node and install node
Edit HTML contents with some local editor then issue pull request.
I think the beauty of PlayCanvas is “Everything is in browser”. It significantly lowers the barrier for game development. The translation workflow is well aligned with this strength. Git based method has very strong advantages as I described above. But the high barrier doesn’t align with the nature of PlayCanvas.
I agree that adding too many sites will lead to less focused product. I’m just hoping my idea would help PlayCanvas team to think of a good way to grow a sound community users!