[documentation] A New Approach to Drupal Tutorials

[Kieran Lal]

Nick, post anything you want to the docs list and I'll post it in the  
handbook.

Having professional Drupal trainers being able to contribute is  
important whether it's through the mailing list or through an  
aggregator.

Cheers,
Kieran
On Jan 14, 2006, at 4:45 PM, Nick Lewis wrote:

> 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 unpublished as a distinct node type in the submission queue.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
> --
> Pending work: http://drupal.org/project/issues/documentation/
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>