The thing with task-oriented user guides or help, is that when you start getting more extensive documentation, it needs to cover more bases, and that's why this has to be a well thought out process. <br><br>All completed Drupal sites work very differently once configured, and I imagine that is part of the reason why the current documentation is more geared towards explaining how things function and what is possible rather than step-by-step and end-user targeted.<br>
<br>As someone who spent endless hours writing and updating customized end-user manuals at my previous job, I know both how valuable that kind of tool is to the users, but also how difficult it is to have any one guide apply to even most use cases.<br>
<br>It is fairly obvious that a lot of people find the current system lacking though, so we should certainly try and pinpoint exactly what is lacking, and what specific changes can be made to ameliorate that.<br><br>So my suggestion here is along the lines of Jennifer's, which is that if you have *specific* ideas or criticisms, please document them as issues, and maybe we can declare a tag "D8help" or something of the sort. And get some of the actual needs nailed down so that when the D7 work settles, we have something tangible to review and base our future discussions off.<br>
<br>Ariane<br><br><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Sun, Nov 15, 2009 at 11:24 AM, Nancy Wichmann <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:nan_wich@bellsouth.net">nan_wich@bellsouth.net</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Shai
Gluskin wrote:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">>
</span>MS Office... probably the best built-in help system I've seen.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
</div><p class="MsoNormal">I sincerely hope we can do better than that. Personally, I
think it has a long way to go. But maybe that’s because I am a long time
power user, so when I have a question, it’s usually a doozy.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The best part of that to model is the task-oriented writing.
Much of Drupal’s documentation is not task-oriented.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">When I was working with IBM mainframes (long ago, in a
galaxy far away) we had a “User’s Guide” and a “User’s
Reference” for most things. The Guide was lower level, and mostly task
oriented, while the Reference was function-oriented, more like DO.</p><div class="im">
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: rgb(31, 73, 125);"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: rgb(31, 73, 125);"> </span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; font-family: "Comic Sans MS"; color: fuchsia;">Nancy E. Wichmann, PMP </span><span style="font-size: 14pt; color: rgb(31, 73, 125);"></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Courier New"; color: rgb(31, 73, 125);">Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. -- Dr.
Martin L. King, Jr</span><span style="font-size: 10pt; color: rgb(31, 73, 125);">.</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; color: rgb(31, 73, 125);"></span></p>
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<br>--<br>
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