[FM Discuss] the new admin system

[adam hyde]

sooo...

some time at last to write about how this all works. Firstly, we now 
have a mix of old and new 'fm' integrations and we are updating them as 
fast as possible. fi.flossmanuals.net and en.flossmanuals.net are the 
new installs of *both* booki and bookipublisher. The French FM will be 
done in April and Translate is being done now.


So, what is all this falava? Well...for those that dont know the history 
here is a 4 line overview:

FM was built on TWiki (still used by translate.flossmanuals.net, 
fr.flossmanuals.net and fa.flossmanuals.net). Aco (lead booki dev) and I 
realised that the old system was no longer able to keep up with what FM 
needed. We built a new system (booki). We are now implementing that.

Booki is what you know from here: http://booki.flossmanuals.net
Booki is where you create manuals...

ok..so. What has all this other falava been about this 'implementing the 
new fm?'...ok...well...Booki is the new system for *editing*. It 
publishes also but the paradigm is significantly different. Booki is not 
built just for FM but is heading off into the wilderness that is the 
'future of the book' (in my opinion). So it is built for FM but with a 
wider context in mind. One of those changes in the model is that Booki 
currently is a more of a book production toolset than a publishing 
mechanism. So you write there and then choose the format to publish your 
content 'elsewhere'. It is the hub for publishing not 'a' publisher in 
its own right (although I think this will change a lot in the months to 
come). This means that the content is built to migrate. So we are 
currently working on an easy method to get a book (manual) to go from 
one booki install to another. You can actually see the first part of 
this if you enter a url like:
http://booki.flossmanuals.net/export/audacity/export/

This will give you a zip file which is the audacity manual. The zip file 
is a  'booki.zip' - a specific way we organise a compressed archive so 
that booki can manage books internally and between booki and objavi (the 
export engine for booki).

A quick line about Objavi - objavi is actually the engine that takes a 
booki.zip and makes a pdf or epub (etc) out of it. It is a separate code 
base and the reason for that is that we can have one or more Objavis 
installed to distribute load. For example, in FM we have one Objavi and 
all FM installations of Booki work with this. There are other 
interesting reasons why Objavi is separate to booki and the credit for 
forseeing the strength of this model needs to be given to Douglas who 
did the development for it.

ok..so. this 'new' FM bizzo...we needed to make a new mechanism to pull 
content from booki.flossmanuals.net so that the readers can see and read 
the nicely formatted final manuals. That is, we needed to replace what 
you see at www.flossmanuals.net with a code base that was not tied into 
the 'old' TWiki and worked with the new booki.

so...I took the 'surface' code of the old FM and rewrote it in PHP to 
work with Booki. This is what is known as 'bookipublisher'. It is now 
implemented for fi.flossmanuals.net and en.flossmanuals.net

So...what does this mean for FM? Well it is another step in 
de-centralising FM. We are trying to pass as much autonomy over to 
'you'. That means you can now create manuals freely in booki (which was 
not possible before). Create your own groups and soon a lot more...the 
Bookipublisher scripts enables you to also publish a manual to FM 
without having to wait on me. You can also blog about what you are doing 
on the FM blog and a few other little bits an pieces.

This is very cool I think as it makes FM much more of a tool for a 
community rather than a tool that Adam and John use on behalf of a 
community :)

In order to use the new mechanism you need an account. Only, at the 
moment, I can add accounts but as we develop the system we will get more 
'admin' accounts so others can add accounts too. Those that are 
maintainers must have an account inorder to be able to update their 
published manuals and to blog. So, I want to start doing this now. 
However, I would prefer to do it slowly as there will undoubtedly be 
bugs and I would like to iron those out before inviting everyone to come 
and play. So, firstly please send an email to the list if you want to 
have an account. Mark the subject 'Maintainer Permissions for [x] 
Please' - where 'x' is the name of the manual or manuals. This way I can 
search the archives of the list and implement these. I wont do all right 
away as mentioned but its good to get the ball rolling.

For those that want to know more about Bookipublisher the script is here:
http://booki-dev.flossmanuals.net

its in the Booki git repository. We need more people to work on this 
script as I see two immediate possibilities:
1. add push capabilities to push books to lulu (lulu has an api for this)
2. increase output formats

anyways...if you cna help that would be cool...if you want to be a 
maintainer please email the list as above :)

adam