Preface

In many Open Source Software (OSS) projects, documentation often fails to get the attention it deserves. Writing documentation is a low priority task on the to-do list of many software developers. They like to write exciting code, come up with cleverly devised algorithms, or try to break the unbreakable. That's all very fine, but we think it's also a pity. Many good OSS projects could have had a much broader user base if more care had been taken to properly document the project.

There are a lot of good (or bad if you wish) reasons for this lack of project documentation:

On the other hand, there is one very good reason why documentation should be written: RTFM is Internet jargon and stands for 'Read The F****** Manual'. The abbreviation certainly shows what many developers tend to think of manuals in general. Others in the Internet community maintain that the full expression is 'Read The Fine Manual'. Whatever the case, we certainly hope that the readers of the Website@School Users' Guide, when using Website@School, will come to regard the latter version as correct.

One of the reasons for our writing this guide the way we did is our target audience, who will be wanting a step-by-step guide. Another reason is that we prefer not to have our work interrupted and precious time wasted by people asking questions when the answers can be found in this guide. We did our very best to make this guide as complete as possible. The Website@School Users' Guide is a work 'always under construction'. Suggestions are most welcome.

Acknowledgements

As is mostly the case with projects like ours, this one too leans heavily on the work of others. Website@School cannot be created without the cooperation of many volunteers who translated Website@School program in numerous languages, translators who translated parts of the manual, testers who found a few bugs and many, many others.
Thanks are due to our donors, people, schools, instituions that use Website@School and support us financially or otherwiste. Details can be found in the Introduction chapter.

We hope you will enjoy your Website@School for years to come.

Dirk Schouten, Amsterdam, the Netherlands <schoutdi (at) knoware (dot) nl>
Peter Fokker, Bussum, the Netherlands <peter (at) berestijn (dot) nl>
Karin Abma, Heemstede, the Netherlands <k.abma (at) quicknet (dot) nl>

July 2013

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Author: Dirk Schouten <schoutdi (at) knoware.nl>