This page is meant for suggestions about this wiki documentation site.

See also OurWishlists.

Is there a piece of Cocoon you just can't get your head around? Think some functionality is under-documented?

Put your suggestions here for areas you think need improving:

It would be great, if there is an category on this wiki there new, reusable components can be placed. So we would have a place, where many components could be found and published.

Yes! I second the motion! Cocoon suffers from not having a clearinghouse for third-party components! Maybe we could just create a wiki page to do that, for starters. As the list grows, we could make a more organized effort, e.g. project name, type, status, short description, ... See http://zope.org/Products/all_products for example. – LarsH

I would love to read about how this Wiki is interfaced with Cocoon, i.e. (I guess), how to configure a Cocoon server to use JSPWiki.

It's not interfaced with Cocoon, it's just the Wiki. – JoergHeinicke

So you mean the Cocoon Wiki doesn't use Cocoon? If not, don't you think it should?

No one has built a fully functioning wiki yet using Cocoon. We judged that it was more important to provide an aid in documentation (the thing you've obviously been reading) than to wait until we could build a wiki on Cocoon. It was a pragmatic decision, and I for one think time has proven it to be a wise one. We eat our own dog food in other ways. When a Cocoon-based wiki exists, I bet we'll use it... – Geoff Howard Jan 25 2004

Also have a look on our future plans for a documentation/content management system named Doco. – JoergHeinicke

I would like to see the stylesheets for this site changed so that is possible to get a decent printout from a page (esp. without the menu on the left); yes, this is possible with stylesheets; no, its not that hard (wink) Alternatively, setting up a Print.jsp page, referenced from the LeftHandMenu is pretty simple (I have done it on my own JPSWiki) – DerekH – 05.05.03

I would like to see some examples of writing Actions in XSP which I understand can be done but have no idea how – AndrewC.Oliver

I would like to see some Sitemap templates (page-> SitemapTemplates / SitemapSnippets), both main sitemaps and sub-sitemaps. Examples like MinimalSitemapConfiguration, etc. (2002.08.07, StenAkselHeien)
– Sten Can you be more specific? I've been adding Examples off of MinimalSitemapConfiguration as I've gone along. Are these what you have in mind? Are there specific things you'd like examples of? - AndrewC.Oliver

Apache Xindice-in-Cocoon documentation - "how can I include Xindice in Cocoon?"

Have a look at XMLIndiceCocoon2.1. – JoergHeinicke

AND a Newbie-Site with downloadable sample.zip's
with all entries in sitemap.xmap, cocoon.xconf ... <a hole collection for newbies/> Hans

Great idea!, as a fellow "newbie" this would have been a usefull resource. KeithMarais

Lists over available entries in site map, sorted in alphabethic order on their names. For a newbie like me, it is not easy to remember if the cool thing I read about was a transformer or a generator. Each entry should be documented with name, type of component, available parameters, and available child elements, effect, role in the architechture, and common examples of use-case (when do I use it).

I am BTW developing a JSPWiki spider that will start at a JSPWiki URL and spider the content into well formed xhtml structure. Could this possibly solve the question on how to get the wiki content to the xdocs?

  • See WikiML for details about, and code for a Outerthought] parser that generates SAX events from files containing Wiki markup. If this code were adapted to become a Cocoon Generator, then a Cocoon instance could be set up by [http://outerthought.org/ which exposes the JSPWiki data as XML – LeighDodds
    • Cool, this would result in documentation coming live and direct from the Wiki. My spider would generate it batch wise, instead. Each with its pros and cons.
  • You might want to user the JSPWiki:WikiRPCInterface of the JSPWiki engine for collecting information. It has methods for getting links of a page, HTML formatted version of a page, or plain text. If you need fully-fledged XML, then you'd need to replace or fix TranslatorReader.java. --JanneJalkanen

In different articles from Stefano and Carsten, they explain cocoon history and what kind of components they have introduced. For me the historical view clarified how Cocoon architecture works today, which I didn't get in the other docs. I would suggest that docs are organized in three levels:

  • Foundation: Cocoon as a publishing engine - only sitemap examples for static content and XML pipelines, plus add-ons for RTF, PDF, mixing content, merging content.
  • Portals: Cocoon as a portals application - Built on top of the basics with fx XSP and the sun*-framework.
  • Advanced and new concepts like the notion of flows and continuations etc – Ola Berg

I just can't get how the database actions/form validator stuff works.. it all is just so complicated that I can't wrap my head around it yet. I am using forms generated through xslt and the sql transform that are calling servlets for now. I would really like to understand this part of cocoon.

Me thinks that the new Forrest skin looks excellent! However, I think you just changed the PageContent.jsp - which means that things like diffs and page information still look like crap (yea, so I wrote the original look... So? I can call them crap (wink). Perhaps if you had made the change to ViewTemplate.jsp, then all pages (except for the editor) would've received the same treatment automatically.

– JanneJalkanen, 03-Jan-2003.

In my copious free time, I want to intermingle Cocoon with the Wiki. It looks like Stephan Michels' Chaperon parser and associated cwiki grammar are starting to solidify, so I'm going to run Cocoon and JSPWiki side-by-side. Cocoon will read the raw wiki files from JSPWiki, and pipe these through a Forrest-inspired/-like/-based pipeline for skinning fun and laughter. To create a navigation out of the flat-linear Wiki docs, I have two possible ideas in mind:

  1. Generate site.xml markup out of LeftMenu HTML.
  2. Manually maintain a TableOfContents page which solely consists of an enumeration/list, which gets translated (also through XSLT) to site.xml syntax.

Doing lots of consecutive XSLT transformations isn't exactly a Good Thing, and BrunoDumon will punish me for this, so any other ideas w.r.t. navigation are welcome. This will buy us PDF printouts of Wiki pages, and proper use of the nifty things in the Forrest skin (like a special print-stylesheet). – StevenNoels, 13/Feb 2003

I would like to see cocoon.apache.org install a system of redirects, so that the many wiki links to URLs such as http://cocoon.apache.org/installing/index.html get redirected to the latest version of the documentation (ie, http://cocoon.apache.org/2.1/installing/index.html. The wiki contains many dead links to the official cocoon docs, because the version number is omitted from the URL. To see an example of this problem, see DocumentationTracksProject.

--LarryLansing

I'd love an offline version of the Wiki as well! Or an downloadable xml version of the content? I'll supply the sitemap and xsl's if you want to, so that we can view the content offline using our own cocoon server... Or is it somewhere already? Should be cool.

--Jelle, nov 7th 2003

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