[drupal-devel] Admin Help writing instructions - 60 patches coming soon

[Gerhard Killesreiter]

On Mon, 16 May 2005, Kieran Lal wrote:

> On May 16, 2005, at 7:40 PM, Gerhard Killesreiter wrote:
>
> First off, thanks for taking the time to respond.  I know
> documentation is not the most fun topic :-)   In general, I think the
> benefits of the english versions will translate as well to translated
> versions.

I hope so.

> Also, I think this a good question for the Drupal docs mailing list.
>
> A couple of things that I think will be beneficial for translators
> will be that the text in the code is going to be reduced and will be
> much more consistent.

That's true.

> I hope that consistency will make for easier
> translations.  Also, I believe the greater reliance on using lists
> of links will make for more clarity and not require as much
> translation.

Probably. But the idea of translation is to translate all documentation.

> > a) Currently, translators can translate the docs for say Drupal 4.6
> > and
> > be pretty sure that they won't change over this release cycle. With
> > you
> > change, the translation might be improved after the release -
> > unless it
> > is agreed not to do this as we do with the code.
>
> Yes, I see this as an advantage.   In the current admin help drafts
> each page ends with "For further information, read the ....http://
> drupal.org/node/####.   Translators can link to their own page
> instead.

Where will those pages reside? Is there any plan for this?

> With regards to versioning we have yet to come up with a
> solution.   We have been discussing it on the mailing list for
> several months and I know it has been a topic for several years.
> Thanks for raising the issue, and I'll take it back to the team.

I had hoped that you'd found a solution. ;)

> The larger issue however, may be the sharp increase in the amount of
> documentation.   There is a strong demand for more contributions
> documentation and this may become a heavy workload for the translators.

I wouldn't worry too much about contrib at the start.

> > b) Different Drupal versions need different docs. How will you show
> > users a set of docs for each version?
>
> Each version of the module's admin help could point to their own page
> on Drupal.org.   This might get messy, but I guess that's what
> content management systems are for :-)

We still should have a solution for this before the help pages are
changed.

My revisions patch will make keeping revisioned information through
Drupal somewhat easier. I think that it would be possible to extend it
further to also allow for branches. This could help to keep
documentation for different branches of Drupal up to date.

Cheers,
	Gerhard