Introducing: The Sparrow Wiki

Daniel Sperl on March 31, 2011

Wow, it’s been a while since I wrote the last blog post. Sorry for the long silence! There was, of course, a reason for the delay: I was busy creating the brand new headquarters for the Sparrow community - The Sparrow Wiki!

After many hours of hard work, the wiki is now finally ready to be visited by all of you! Find it under the following URL: wiki.sparrow-framework.org

What is the Sparrow Wiki?

As many of you will know, I am visiting the Sparrow forum almost every day, and so I was amazed to watch the Sparrow community grow at a tremendous speed. Hundreds of users have registered at the forum, many of which visit it regularly and do an incredible job in helping out others. I cannot remember a single question in the forum that would have been left without reply. A big thanks to all of you!

Besides answering questions, a lot of fruitful discussions take place in the forum. Many of you wanted to contribute to Sparrow, but found it difficult to do so. Some users wrote detailed tutorials, others created extremely powerful extensions; several games were even made completely open source, so that others could learn from them!

So I was looking for a way to make those contributions easier to make and, perhaps even more important: easier to find. That’s how the Sparrow wiki was born.

What to find there

Currently, the wiki contains the following sections:

  • The Sparrow Manual: Sparrow’s user manual, which was hosted on this page before.
  • Tutorials, Tips & Tricks: A growing list of tutorials
  • Extensions: Discover custom classes to get new functionality for your games. Already includes many useful extensions like a thumbstick or a parallax scrolling sprite!
  • Sparrow-powered games: add your Sparrow-powered games to this list! This replaces the “In Action” area of the main homepage. The many releases you are throwing out made it impossible for me to do this myself any longer! ;-)
  • … and there’s more to come!

(Nearly) all the content is free for anybody to edit and extend. Editing pages can be done anonymously - registering is only necessary if you want to create a new page. Let’s see if this works out; if the wiki is soon bursting of Spam, I’ll have to reconsider that. (If you find Spam, please do me the favor and eradicate it immediately. Spit on it, burn it, flush it down the toilet - then hit the “Save” button.)

Wanted: your help!

Of course, a wiki that is left alone is rather useless. Sparrow needs your help to make a cosy and productive environment out of that space. I am happy about any contributions!

Nevertheless, it is important to keep the wiki organized and well structured, so that anybody can easily find what he/she is looking for. I tried my best to create useful categories and to fill the wiki with a lot of initial content, setting an example of how it should be organized. Nevertheless, I will watch the changes regularly and will do my best to keep everything in good order.

Conclusion

I hope you find the wiki as useful as I do! There is now one single place to go when looking for documentation, and a place hosting extensions that constantly enhance Sparrow, even in times where there is no new release at hand.

P.S.:The wiki was created with the Wiki-Engine DokuWiki, which is really an amazing piece of software. I can warmly recommend it to anyone who wants to set up a wiki! Special thanks to Andreas Gohr for his efforts with DokuWiki!