[sword-devel] publishing user-authored modules

Tue Aug 7 00:58:41 MST 2007

Good day,

I think that this is a good idea. However, I'm not sure how easy it is
or how the author would prepare a work, using the front-ends available,
to be shared with others. For the two fronts that I am a little familiar
with, Sword CS and BibleTime, a user can generate a personal commentary.
But can they generate multiple personal modules? How does a basic user
prepare these modules without some help from someone who knows Sword a
little better? I don't like the idea of instructing a user how to
prepare a marked up file with a text editor. There is interest in this
in Thailand but we are still stuck with lack of utf-8 capability in the
personal editor.

I don't want to stop anyone from going in this direction but don't see
the starting point clearly yet. Tell me what I've missed, please.

ak

On 08/06/2007 11:54 PM, Troy A. Griffitts wrote:
> Karl and Peter,
>
> These are great ideas!  A week or so ago I added 
> http://crosswire.org/community as a place to start putting up community 
> collaboration tools we've been talking about for quite a while now.  I 
> was going to start by developing a web-based genbook creator tool which 
> would allow contributors to develop an index of the CSNTM resources for 
> display with the Papyri tool we've had kindof working and sitting around 
> for a while now.
>
> The goal with the community tools is to allow anyone to contribute to a 
> data repository which will be freely downloadable for programmatic use 
> (of course as a sword module, but easily exportable or even downloadable 
> in other formats).
>
> I have been asking around about a very simple and light community 
> framework which easily allows adding custom tools, as most everything we 
> add will be custom.  I'd rather us not write it ourselves if we can find 
> something that is not overkill and works well for us.
>
> This would be a great place to add a web frontend to browse user 
> submitted modules, and as Peter suggests, allow people to upload and 
> work on modules as a group.
>
> Thanks for the ideas!  Excited to develop this stuff together.
>
> 	-Troy.
>
>
>
>
> Familie von Kaehne wrote:
>   
>> I think this is a brilliant idea. I would take this one step further -
>> if tehre were tools for collaborative working - modules get checked in
>> and out via a subversion style mchanism - this would be a way of
>> allowing authoring collectives to eiter import big stuff or create from
>> scratch.
>>
>> Peter
>>
>>
>> Karl Kleinpaste wrote:
>>     
>>> Thanx to Troy yesterday for a private suggestion that worked around my
>>> problem with search framework.
>>>
>>> I have a longer-term question to raise, something to give thought, as to
>>> what Sword might/should offer in the way of future infrastructure.
>>>
>>> Probably the most common request we get for new GnomeSword features is
>>> authoring support.  Generally this revolves around the desire of some to
>>> be able to write up sermons and other personal commentary, or to develop
>>> prayer lists and customized devotionals.  So I'm developing a thought
>>> for how to go about an import operation.  But the Really Big Deal beyond
>>> merely creating such modules is sharing them.
>>>
>>> By comparison, Libronix has what they call the "sermon add-in".  This is
>>> a means by which pastors and other authors can prepare their own texts
>>> so they can then be automatically shared with others.
>>>
>>> It's this latter capability that intrigues me.  As I work up the
>>> importer concept for GS, the basics of getting the user to identify the
>>> text features, collect all the needed *.conf info, pass the text through
>>> one of the available tools, these are operations that are
>>> straightforward.  We even have an Archive button in our module manager,
>>> which drops a *.zip of the named modules.
>>>
>>> What would be really cool is if we could also offer a Publish button,
>>> whereby users could develop some community in the form of being able to
>>> share modules they've created.
>>>
>>> I perceive that this is a bigger issue than GnomeSword, that it ought to
>>> have some serious infrastructural support, specifically that the Sword
>>> install manager class could provide for the definition of upload
>>> repositories to which modules could be sent on demand.  In the same way
>>> that download repositories can be specified by host+directory, I'd like
>>> to be able to offer to users, "Publish: send your module out into the
>>> world so others benefit from what you've learned/produced/written,"
>>> where the resulting uploaded module is then made available in a
>>> downloadable state for others to retrieve.  The upload repository should
>>> have some brief automated analysis of uploaded content to ensure that a
>>> legitimately-formatted module is in place (e.g. mods.d/foo.conf, and
>>> that DataPath matches what's found in modules/what/ever/foo), and having
>>> thus confirmed general module sanity, move it into place for download.
>>>
>>> Anyone else have related thoughts?
>>>
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