[OpenLayers-Users] by example

[Tim Schaub]

Hey-

So, I gave the examples a bit of a facelift 
(http://trac.openlayers.org/changeset/7095).  Based on the work that was 
started by Josh Livni and others at FOSS4G 07, I updated the script that 
parses examples and created a new "index" page for examples:

http://openlayers.org/dev/examples/

(Thanks to Chris for making this the default view for that dir and 
creating a nice shell script so that the single file build is used for 
those examples - http://trac.openlayers.org/changeset/7122.)

The hope is that it will be easier for people to find examples relevant 
to what they want to do with OpenLayers.  You can filter the example 
list by keywords.  E.g. http://openlayers.org/dev/examples/?q=wms

Now, this is only as useful as we make it.  If there are folks who would 
like to help out, we could still use more/better documentation in these 
examples.  If you follow the convention laid out in the existing 
examples (element ids for title, tags, shortdesc, and docs), the index 
page will work.  As we get more tags and classes listed in examples, we 
can update the index page to allow more control in searching for examples.

I acknowledge that our class docs are *not* an easy way to learn the 
library, our tests are usually the *last* thing that developers 
understand, and nobody has taken any time to write up nice tutorials 
(though a tutorials directory and basic template would be a nice 
addition).  So, for now, I think people will continue to learn by 
example.  Any help we can get in making these examples more useful would 
be appreciated.

http://trac.openlayers.org/wiki/HowToContribute

Tim