[pmwiki-users] RFC: Expanding the PmWiki.FAQ

[Chris Cox]

Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
> Currently the PmWiki.FAQ page has a lot of useful questions
> and answers (I think credit goes to Hagan Fox for keeping
> this page as sane and useful as it is).
> 
> However, it occurs to me that for some questions it would make
> more sense for the question and answer to appear on the specific
> page that describes it.  For example, frequently asked questions
> about WikiFarms might be better placed on the WikiFarms page itself
> rather than the FAQ page.
> 
> I'm also concerned that eventually the FAQ page will get too large
> and unmanagable on its own, so we need to separate things up
> somehow.
> 
> Would it make sense to have "faq" sections at the bottoms of
> documentation pages, below the trail markers, where people can
> leave questions and answers can be placed?  This might be more
> helpful and easier to maintain than trying to have separate FAQ
> pages, and it's more immediately available.
> 
> We could generate a "master FAQ list" page by doing 
> something like:
> 
>     (:pagelist group=PmWiki "[[#faq]]" fmt=#includefaq:)
> 
> This would display a combined list of all of the [[#faq]]
> sections from pages in the PmWiki group, formatted in some
> useful fashion (with references to the original page for each).
> 
> Comments?

Yes I think that's a good approach.  At work we are only running
2.0 and we don't have the extra pagelist support (at least I
believe that is the case) and we use (:include:) to pull in the
FAQs into one page, each section with a self referencing link
and (:toc:) so you can narrow things down easily.

here's some examples... (sorry about the length of this post)...

The main FAQ page has:

   (:title LABS Support FAQ:)
   (:table width=100% cellspacing=0 border=1 bgcolor=#eeeeee
bordercolor=#888888:)
   (:cell:)
   (:toc:)
   (:tableend:)

   (:include LABSSupport/FAQ:)
   (:include Unix/FAQs:)

And for example, the Unix/FAQs page has:

   (:table width=100% cellspacing=0 border=1 bgcolor=#eeeeee
bordercolor=#888888:)
   (:cell:)
   (:toc:)
   (:tableend:)

   (:include Unix/SunFAQ:)
   (:include Unix/IBMFAQ:)
   (:include Unix/HPFAQ:)
   (:include Unix/SUSEFAQ:)
   (:include Unix/RedHatFAQ:)

And the Unix/SunFAQ page has:

   (:table width=100% cellspacing=0 border=1 bgcolor=#eeeeee
bordercolor=#888888:)
   (:cell:)
   (:toc:)
   (:tableend:)

   ! How big of a drive can a Sun box handle?]]

   Apparently Solaris 8 cannot handle drives over 1 TB in size.  We
   discovered that in trying to add 1.25 TB to @@sun1@@.  On a
   SunBlade 100 or earlier Sun boxes with IDE/ATA drives, you will be
   limited to 137GB.

   Do to limitations of the SCSI device driver in Solaris, Solaris 9
   supports a maximum disk size of 2 TB. ... etc....