[documentation] A New Approach to Drupal Tutorials

[Nick Lewis]

Here is a really nutty idea. I regularly write drupal tutorials at my 
blog, and file them under the term "drupal tutorials":
http://nicklewis.smartcampaigns.com/taxonomy/term/177

I've been asked a couple of times to publish some of them at drupal.org, 
but I am a busy and lazy person and haven't really figured out how to do 
that. I suspect many of my fellows who write drupal tutorials are in 
similar situations. However, we now have some handy modules like 
aggregator2 that allow us to take a creative alternative approach:

Using aggregator2 we could take in feeds from drupal developers who 
write tutorials (and who give drupal.org permission). There are more 
than a couple developers like myself who bother to write tutorials these 
days; a few canidates might be:
http://www.cookingwithdrupal.org
http://urlgreyhot.com/personal/subjects/computers_and_internet/web_design_and_development/content_management_systems/drupal_0

Note that there are several other sites I know of that have a cache of 
drupal tutorials, but not a generalized enough term -- I'm sure they'd 
be happy to create one for this purpose however.

So aggregator2 would feed in new tutorials, and save them as full 
fledged nodes at drupal.org. We'd probably at first leave the nodes 
unpublished as a distinct node type in the submission queue. When a new 
tutorial pops up, all documentation people would have to do is review 
it, and file under whatever appropriate taxonomy term they choose. The 
end result could be a properly reviewed, organized library of articles 
that is created with minimal effort on the part of documentation 
writers, and minimal barriers for the writers of tutorials. This seems 
to be a win-win that could greatly increase the amount of quality 
content on drupal.org while reducing the amount of work the docs team 
has to do.

I already have scripts that address some problems involving attributing 
the article that we'd run into using aggregator2. (for example, if we 
wanted to merely feed in and categorize links to these offsite tutorials 
without displaying all that crap that comes along with every node, I 
already have a script to do it). We could also associate a ratings 
module for the tutorials. I'd be happy to do any additional development 
required.

This might not be appropriate for drupal.org. But at the very least, I 
think the idea of generating content from offsite drupal developers and 
evangelists using RSS from narrow terms is an idea worth exploring. It 
is certainly an idea that is ready for implementation.

Onward!
Nick Lewis
http://nicklewis.smartcampaigns.com