[jimabshire]

Ironically, the use I plan to make for bbPress is to create a model for “Living Documentation” as described in the book “Specification by Example” for various types of software projects.

I am new to the Open Software model after having spent 30 odd years working within the “private” model. I see clear sustainability problems if users behave like typical users: demanding more and more from people who are being paid a fraction they are in the private model. Something has got to give. The proliferation of modules reflects current design methods of keeping each one fairly small/simple. The problem with that approach is that it indeed requires key overview docs including use of things like stepwise refinement and UML docs in order to obtain a cohesive grasp of the whole. As in baseball, “you can’t tell the players without a program!”

wordpress at least has several “apparently good” books to explain the development paradigm. bbPress users are not so lucky.

It is a very big job to create this very useful software and we should be more appreciative to those who have accepted this challenge – consider how long it would take any of us to write the volume of php code or even do the design work!

I think Mr. Jacoby is correct – if everyone who ran down a problem bothered to leave a little “map” or narrative of his journey we might get a better picture of how this thing works. The only problem I see with that is too many requirements: 1) user has to be able to ferret out the problem; 2) user has to be correct; 3) user has to be able to write carefully. There may be others requirements as well.

Ideally, we need better docs that reduce the abstractions presented to us in the form of raw code. It seems to me that the community needs to decide that bug fixes and new features should wait until the overall design can be made clear to nearly all of us.

[jimabshire]

The links above are all giving Error 404 – Destination Not Found

If this is temporary, then please delete this post after the problem is corrected. Thank you

[jimabshire]

Thank you for your tenacity and willingness to share what you learned – your “problem” was my solution!!