[drupal-docs] Planning for the Drupal 4.7 Documentation Sprint

[Kieran Lal]

There are 4 long term changes we need to accomplish for  
administration help to be sustainable.
1) We now have a good base of about 64 administration help pages for  
4.6.  We need to make sure there is a creation of a standard, and  
guidelines for documentation contributors.  This should be reviewed  
by Drupal administrators as potential audience members so that they  
could contribute to the documentation.   For 4.7 I am going to  
suggest the following additions to admin help: Add pictures, add a  
link to file a bug or request a feature.

2) We need to empower module developers to use administration help.   
They need to know where to get the documentation, guidelines on how  
to convert it into code, and a commitment to get help from the  
documentation team if they do write or include the documentation.  A  
mass mail to all the CVS account holders seems like a potential  
solution.

3) We need a long term technically viable help solution that involves  
automatically getting documentation.

4) We need Drupal.org to allow anonymous users to contribute pages to  
the Handbook, especially administration help for modules.  The  
barrier to contribute to documentation is currently too high and does  
not maintain a consistently high level that a closed documentation  
system would normally deliver.

I'd suggest that we focus on building documentation infrastructure  
now that we have some good momentum going on for the handbook.

Cheers,
Kieran
On Aug 28, 2005, at 9:01 PM, Charlie Lowe wrote:

> With the Drupal feature freeze underway, it won't be long now  
> before we need to begin a documentation sprint for Drupal 4.7 to  
> update the existing admin/help documentation that Kieran previously  
> worked so hard on.
>
> The purpose of this email is to discuss the best process for  
> achieving this. As I see it, there are two approaches:
>
> 1) The Drupal docs team reviews all of the admin/help docs in the  
> following sections:
>
> http://drupal.org/handbook/modules
> http://drupal.org/handbook/config/contribmodules
>
> Problem with this:
>
> * difficult to coordinate
> * many contrib modules are not updated until after the release  
> candidate right before Drupal 4.7 will be official released (if not  
> afterwards). Depending on how module API's have been changed for  
> this release (is this a factor?), they may not work until then.
>
> I would imagine we would need to shoot for reviews and updates of  
> the core modules right before and right after Drupal 4.7 RC.
>
> 2) A better way to do this would be to implement an ongoing  
> process, one that would require the participation of developers.  
> *If* we could get developers working on modules to submit  
> Documentation issues when they have made changes to a module which  
> requires a documentaiton update, we could take care of these on a  
> case-by-base basis, with a big push to finish up any during the RC  
> release in time for the stable version. Also, this would allow us  
> to track needed changes to contrib module documentation and provide  
> patches for subsequent updates.
>
> ****
>
>
> Any thoughts?
>
> Charlie Lowe
>
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