Topic Type:
Idea
I have a concern that too many conceptual posts, or documentation type posts may clutter the focus of the tool wiki listings. Once idea that might take advantage of the forum/wiki construct but not dilute the tool wiki listings would be to use floating wikis for business documents, and conceptual discussions. These wikis could be accessed through links in the forum, but would not be listed along with the tools. Right now, this is not much of a problem, but might be worth keeping in mind for later...
Agreed. At the moment we can attach a forum and wiki to Tool entities but my long term development goal is to be able to attach forum and wikis to other types of entities. Above you mention two types of possible entities, business document and concepts. The reason why business documents don't work well as tools is because they don't fit the meta data model that we are using with Tools, ie. the stages of a business document does not necessarily fit Concept->Prototype->DIY->Commercial. Perhaps the Tool entity would be better defined as the "Physical Tool" entity.
On this site, right now, we can easily define new entity types and add meta data models. The trick is upon creating an instance of an entity type, also create an associated wiki/forum and attach them visually to the entity's page. We also need to be able to define on a per entity type basis, when a forum is created, where it should be placed in the Forum structure. It's a simple concept and I can reuse much of the work done on the Tool entity type but it's still 3 or 4 days of work. The nice thing about it is that as soon as that work is done then we can go wild with new entity types knowing they'll have attached forums and wikis.
I am thinking that for now I might move this type of post over to a floating wiki just to test the concept and until we have another place to put it. I think it would be good to encourage this type of wiki post, but as I mentioned before if we have too many of these types it dilutes the physical tool meta data model.
I do think it is a good conversation to have. Documents and templates I think could follow the same development pattern as they move from concept to a robust and well documented template - so our model does not have to be tweaked much, but just run in parallel, just as you say above. I think that will be a valuable feature...thanks again for all the great work!