[drupal-devel] Preparing Drupal admin/help documentation for Drupal 4.7

[Charlie Lowe]

After Drupal hits the code freeze for 4.7, we'll need to begin updating 
the admin/help documentation for 4.7 in a documentation sprint to 
prepare for the coming stable release.

Kieran did a great job this summer at organizing a documentation sprint 
to create the recent updates for admin/help. We could certainly try to 
follow this process again of getting everyone organized to review all 
existing documentation and providing updates where needed.

There are a few problems with this process:

1) Reviewing all existing module functionality is a massive undertaking.

2) Module functionality may change slightly during the feature 
freeze/release candidate cycle, meaning that some admin/help that has 
already been reviewed may need to re-reviewed. Tracking such changes is 
difficult.

2) Contributed modules may or may not be updated during the 4.7 feature 
freeze/release candidate cycle and may be end up with functionality 
change outside of the time frame of the documentation sprint.

3) Because this requires organizing people into specific tasks, it makes 
it difficult for anyone to jump in and assist when they have time.

Rather than depending again on this hierarchical organizational model, 
I'd like to propose that admin/help documentation construction and 
update be built around a distributed, ongoing development model much 
like the rest of Drupal development. However, it depends in part upon 
you--the developers--so I'd like to get your feedback on the feasibility 
and method for this process:

1) Developers who have made changes to core or contributed modules which 
necessitate changes to existing admin/help will file documentation 
update requests via the Documentation project. When possible, those 
documentation requests should contain some description of the changes in 
functionality to the module.

2) Those who have created new contributed modules can similarly file 
requests for new admin/help documentation.

3) Anyone may jump in and assist with updating admin/help documentation 
by examining outstanding issues and assigning the tasks to themselves.

4) During the documentation sprint for the new release, we will push to 
make sure that sure that all outstanding issues are resolved.

Thoughts?

Charlie Lowe