[documentation] The handbook organization

[Laura Scott]

On Sep 1, 2006, at 8:08 PM, Charlie Lowe wrote:

> Steven Peck wrote:
>> Maybe if someone who is interested put together an outline?   
>> Tossed some
>> intial suggested content?
>
> But an outline is not the starting point for doing this. An outline  
> would come after a group of people discussed the various rhetorical  
> strategies for what the About section needs to do and figured out  
> what needs to go in it.

I think the precursor to that is to ask what the questions are, what  
the actual problems are with the handbook. I posit these candidates:

1) The hierarchical structure makes navigation difficult, forcing  
people to "drill down" based on best guesses of where the info they  
want may lie. Drill down the wrong hole, and it's very hard to jump  
across, unless someone has added a manual link, a process that is  
very web 1.0.

2) The multiple active Drupal releases, each with its own API, leads  
to confusion as to what a given handbook page refers to. Using  
taxonomy to tag versions is a start in clarifying things, but aside  
from adding the tags themselves, we don't actually do anything with  
those tags.

3) Lack of date and timestamps make it hard for users to gauge the  
quality and relevance of a given handbook page.

I feel like the Drupal Handbooks fall short by failing to "eat our  
own dogfood." Using taxonomy, some custom views, custom content types  
(?) and maybe some of the contrib modules that enable taxonomy-based  
linking could open up some interesting possibilities. How many of us  
have been building community websites now? Certainly amongst us all  
we can come up with something.

If a more robust usage of Drupal's taxonomy yields some interest  
here, I'd be happy to work with others in developing a proposed  
architecture. If simply reshuffling the deck is contemplated, well,  
I'll pipe up but I feel the structure itself is too inherently  
limited to effect profound change (though changing the content itself  
could).

If there's a better idea out there, I'm all for it.

Laura