Tuesday, March 01, 2011

APEXBlogs v2 - Knowledge Base

This post is part of the 10 days of APEXBlogs. This series of blog posts highlight the features of the new version (APEXBlogs v2) of APEXBlogs.info which will be released shortly.

This is the 9th post... and is about a new feature in APEXBlogs called "Knowledge Base".

It consists out of three different parts (copied directly from the new APEXBlogs site):
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Quick Tips

There're so many smart people out there, just like you, but they don't really want to start a blog. What about write a quick tip on this website? Once you are logged in you can share any tips, and your views on APEX in this area. Why just keep it in your head if you can share it with others?

Forum Mining

The APEX Forum is a great source of information, but many questions get repeated or answered only after a few iterations. This area will mine the forum for interesting questions and answers so you find the solution easily and fast.

APEX Enhancement Requests (and bugs)

You found a bug or want to have something just a bit different to work in APEX? Or you have a wish list of features you'd like to have in the next version of APEX? This area is exactly meant for that! So start to review the existing enhancement requests, comment on it and vote for the ones you like most or submit a new request when you can't find it.
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What do you think? Will the above be useful and work?

Here are my reasons why I included it:
- I've seen so many posts out there about feature requests for ex. and then in the forum you have the same, but there was not a single place of the "truth", what the community wanted.
- In APEXBlogs v1 you could already write Quick Tips or Blog Posts it was called there directly from the site, but it wasn't used that much. By moving it to the knowledge base I hope people will start using it again more.
- And finally Forum Mining... a thing Steve Howard, John Scott and myself talked about for the first time, 4 or 5 years ago now and never did it... it's hard to do and very time consuming. For this section I'm searching for "Editors". The Editor will basically help to make this section a success. The way I see it working is that everybody can submit a link, but the editors will mine it. Or the alternative is that people mine it and the Editors review it.

Would anybody be interested in being an Editor on APEXBlogs?
(to be an editor I expect you have at least a few months APEX experience)

2 comments:

Mark Lancaster said...

Hi Dimitri

Each of your features for the Knowledge Base has great merit.

I particularly like the APEX Enhancement Requests idea.
There APEX team are very good at monitoring the APEX forum, but it's not any easy task I'm sure.

This would make life easier, as well as raise visibility for everyone.

The APEXBlogs site is a fantastic resource already, so very much looking forward to the new version.

Mark

Martin D'Souza said...

Hi Dimitri,

I think the forum mining and APEX enhancement requests/bugs will be very useful.

Can't wait to try v2!

Martin