OpenWack Community Software Blog

We had an uneasy feeling that we ought to support IE6 for the default theme of OpenWack – the one that will be bundled with the basic distro and will always be used for admin area. But then we decided to look at WackWall stats. If a million pageviews a month is any indication we found out that IE6 is used by less than 8% of visitors on WackWall social networks. So we decided to join the camp of those designers who prefer to ignore IE6 and its incurable problems.

Internet Explorer 6, an ugly creature – you can wrap up in a white shroud and crawl to the graveyard where you belong. The reason you are still undead is another big Microsoft failure – Windows Vista. If people did not snatch at their non-upgraded Windows XP copies IE6 would be long gone.

I think IE6 problems are well-documented on the web by designers so I’ll spare you the rhetoric. Default theme for OpenWack will not support IE6.

While development we use technical specifications for writing code with schemas, drawings, sketches and text. Tomorrow we start laying down proper documentation based on the references we use ourselves.

We realize that some things change right on the road and we will have to rewrite some parts together with the code but the absolute majority of this material is going to stay there. We want to keep this process running along the development because of 2 reasons:

1) It’s just much easier to contribute to documentation writing in small parts using our own references and putting for you what have been magically turned into working code. So it’s not like a damned abyss of work to write the whole thing when the fun part (development) is done.

2) You will have complete reference in the end because it’s being forged right on the dev assembly line and covers particularly anything that is being actually developed.

We understand that nobody wants to read manuals and that is why we will do everything to make it not critical for you to start using/developing for OpenWack. On the other hand, any open source project needs to have sufficient technical reference and manuals to attract rock-star plugin developers. Who is going to dedicate their time to your project if you can’t even describe it properly? We are definitely determined to avoid this question. ;)

Update: We have set up documentation wiki here: docs.openwack.org. This is what will be used by the development team and later by plugin developers and theme designers. Watch it getting filled with the documentation, references, specifications and howtos.