I would like to see a best Practices Child board that only the HEROs can post to.
There are some really great nuggets buried in these forums … Many times the heros have to repeat them selves.
The subjects would then be nice and clear and many of the nuggets will find their way to a central place. We could use the other boards to discuss what should be a best practice or propose a solution to a problem be promoted to a best practice. But the Heros would have the definitive word in the best practices board.
An example might be “Using Timers” and can address the best practices for short duration vs long duration etc …
Or one on “Template to Build a Virtual Device”
It would be a better place then to sort through all of the forums which subjects like
“Why does my program not work …” to find these gems.
It may be simpler/cleaner for these to get promoted to the Wiki. Anyone can get an account there, and then edit either the existing pages (for scene snippets, by Device type, for example) or create a new series/category of pages like the HowTo pages that @Henk created some time back.
This will take some discipline to do, but in the end it would mean the ‘repository’ would be clean of any chit-chat (from a forum post). Some consistency/template would be required, similar to how the HowTo pages all look similar, with reference links to the forum (but not a link to the forum that forces the user to go there to find the info, as the ‘nugget’ should be directly shown in the wiki itself)
This would also let anyone make the contribution, not just the Hero members. Some people could decide that this is goin to be their contribution to the community, taking incubated snippets from the forum, after all the discussion has subsided, and promoting them to the wiki.
WIKI or FORUM does not matter to me.
I would just like to see the Hero’s be in a review/audit mode for a promotion … not for providing all of the content.
When ANYONE thinks that there is information missing on a particular topic of general interest … they should start a forum thread to discuss it. Someone active on that thread should summarize and forward to a hero for posting to the best practices.
Then when something major like UI5 comes along, we could update/illustrate how the best practices change based on platforms.
If we leave it open to anyone to contribute, it’s just another place for junk to accumulate.
After all one person’s gold nugget might really be just fools gold 
After thinking about it I think you are right. Use the Wiki to for a community written book on how to program the Vera. The key thing would be to start with an index. And ask people to fill in the details. An action that comes out of a discussion in a particular board would then be to summarize and add it to THE BOOK.
It would be nice to seed the index. And maybe that is a role for the heros.
Maybe start the effort with a Wiki page and this (or another) thread on an initial index for a community written book on how to program the vera.
Yup, I consider the Forum as the vehicle for incubating content, and the Wiki as the vehicle for documenting it.
The revised Forum Category outline you see today was a result of attempting to build an index of sorts for that incubation to logically occur in (with “General” being the outlier, and the bit bucket for understanding what Categories are missing… eg. Network setup, Z-Wave Basics/Architechture/Healing, and so on)
I suspect for a real Wiki, a better index is needed. Something more refined, and I’d argue that it would be better developed (or evolved from the Forum Categorization) by the newer users… some of us know the problems, and their resolutions, but not necessarily how to structure something for new people coming along (IHMO)
… or maybe it’s easier just to start with the Programming section of the Wiki, and learn from those experiences. The real challenge here is that MCV “changes” the meaning of many of their [already undocumented] behaviors, so there’s a STRONG[sup]*[/sup] likelihood that the documentation would get destroyed on UI6, UI7, UI8… etc - at least until they fundamentally change their stance on Backward compatibility for Plugins.
Many of the senior members already subscribe to the RSS Feed for the Wiki that lets them know when documents are changed/added. It’s typically why we know that the Wiki has been hacked well before MCV’s team does.
- Based upon my past experiences with UI2, UI3, UI4 and UI5
I was primarily focused on the programming side but the same strategy could work for all of the forms.
i.e. Have a top level wiki page for each board. It’s purpose being the index of wiki pages for that forum board, referencing a how to guide for that forum as appropriate.
I will start a wiki page for How To Guide for Customizing. I am sure you will see it.
@RichardTSchaefer,
If you’d like to pilot this, let me know you’re account-name on [tt]wiki.micasaverde.com[/tt] and I’ll set you up with editing rights. From there, you’d be able to pilot a page or two, in whatever form you think might work, and then get real feedback from the other forums users. They can be in whatever focus-area makes sense to you, or best covers your interests…
This is [roughly] how @Henk did the end-user centric HowTo pages that we see linked today from the TLD of wiki.micasaverde.com