[consulting] Basic doc for consulting clients

[Thomas Barregren]

Melissa Duits wrote:
> Maybe I misread Rob Barreca's initial inquiry. To me it sounded like 
> he was looking for docs that explained to clients how to use a drupal 
> site. Jakob Persson's tutorial seems more geared to teach people how 
> to build a drupal site.

I don't think you misread it. I also understood it as if Rob were asking 
for docs that would help clients to quickly get up to speed using their 
Drupal powered sites they have purchased from us consultants. And I 
agree. There is a demand for a more customer oriented documentation.

With "customer oriented documentation" I mean a handbook written special 
for our clients, who, as Melissa put it, "just wants to know how to make 
the site work - how to add a page, upload an image, etc." The current 
handbook is, in my opinion, broken up into too many and too brief 
snippets to be comprehensible for at least my customers. For some 
examples of what I mean, see http://drupal.org/node/21859 and 
http://drupal.org/node/21856. It isn't my intention to carp at the 
handbook. I find it very good with open source standards, and very 
useful for us Drupal versed. But there is room for improvements when it 
comes to customer oriented documentation.

I'm willing to contribute to Rob's initiative in that direction. 
However, instead of starting off a new documentation effort, which I 
construe as Rob's thought, I would rather prefer to improve or 
supplement the current handbook somehow.  But to start with, I think it 
is better to work within a sandbox, and wait to formally publishing it 
on Drupal.org until it is judged ready. Why? I don't know if anyone else 
feels like me, but I think it is intimidating to publish something which 
for a fact will be scrutinized by many critical people. I therefore tend 
to withhold my work until I'm dam sure that I can stand for it. If more 
people feel like me, it will have a restraining influence on a 
collaborative effort such as writing a new customer oriented 
documentation. But if we work on a collaborative document clearly marked 
as a sandbox (or draft or pre-alpha or whatever), then I and probably 
many more would feel much easier to contribute in an early stage of 
witting, and thereby reducing the risk of duplicated effort and increase 
the chance of constructive criticism. Am I  talking through my hat?

 From one thing to another, it could be argued that this discussion 
should be held on the documentation mailing list instead of here. But I 
think that is a less good idea, at least for now, since we are talking 
about documentation for consultants' customers. If we move this 
discussion to the documentation mailing list, I'm afraid we will miss 
many valuable and well-informed opinions.

Cheers,
Thomas