[documentation] The handbook organization

[Charlie Lowe]

See, much of this is affects documentation and using Drupal as a 
reference. I'm thinking the About section needs to be a marketing 
document. If applicable, those are all things to deal with after 
discussing rhetorical strategies for that section.

Laura Scott wrote:
> 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
> 
> 
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