Home Toolkit

About the Toolkit

Behaviours

The toolkit is simply a web site and you can use it by bouncing around from link to link.

We have intended the toolkit to be an adjunct to the CW3 Wiki CW3 Documentation. We provide links to the documentation throughout the toolkit.

We also provide links to other resources. Many of the resources are web sites and we cannot guarantee that the links we provide will remain valid. In fact, the resources we have linked may go the way of the Dodo too. If you see that happening please let us know so that we can update the toolkit.

Throughout the text we try to bring items to your attention. You’ll see items that have been tagged, such as CW3 Wiki above. There a a few different types.

TIP this is a handy piece of information
TRAP watch out, don’t get caught
CRAP something’s not right and it’s out of your control
GOTCHA pay attention to avoid surprises
NOTICE WARNING and ALERT these are things you should know
Pros and Cons will give you sense of what the costs and benefits are

Foundations

The toolkit has been built using markdown formatted text files in a Github repository.

Our rationale for choosing markdown format is that it is widely used by many different types of software, and fairly easy to learn or imitate.

We chose to use a public github repository to host the toolkit. Doing so provided us with the ability to publish our work on the web immediately and we have the confidence that the work will continue to be hosted and remain available for people to use.

In addition, a Github repo had a lot of other advantages.

Sharing and Improving the Toolkit

The toolkit is hosted by Github and managed using a version control system. This enables us to invite and accept changes from you. We can do this easily because the system manages the process of modification, additions, and deletions. We can monitor every single change, rolling backwards and forwards with only a few mouse-clicks.

Behind the scenes is a continuous deployment system. This watches our repo, and if there are any changes it will proccess them. That ensures that updates to the toolkit repo are reflected in the web site within 15mins of us editing anything.

If you want to participate, set up an account on Github and fork the toolkit. When you are ready, send a pull request through to our repo.

Contributing

There are several ways to contribute. The simplest is to raise an issue on the repository. We’ll be notified and have a look at your issue. We’ll make changes in accordance with your advice or we’ll start a discussion with you about it.

If you feel like you want to make a larger contribution to the toolkit you can fork the repo. That will provide you with a full working copy. Make the changes or additions that you want to see included in the Toolkit and then send a pull request. We’ll be able to look at your contributions and then either accept them in full or in part.

The beauty of having the toolkit under version control is that our combined efforts can allow the toolkit to grow, becomming better and more useful.