[documentation] Introduction and question about restructuring

[Steven Peck]

Part of my joy this month has me barely scanning drupal.org stuff due
to workload, so my responses will probably come in batches as I can
get back to this.

On Dec 6, 2007 11:24 AM, Addison Berry <drupal at rocktreesky.com> wrote:
> Hi Lee and welcome!
>
> I don't have time for complete response as Steven has thankfully taken
> the time to do.  I did want to point out though that there is
> drupal.org reorganization group and there is a specific thread about
> the Handbook landing page (http://groups.drupal.org/node/6568) which
> you may want to jump on as well.
>
> This is the overview doc thread that Steven referred to, http://drupal.org/node/180296
> .  Jay (nitrospectide) put lots of effort into it and It has some
> great stuff in it. I am fighting to find time to give a thoughtful
> review/response.  More eyes on that would be lovely.
>
> - Addi
>
>
> On Dec 5, 2007, at 3:32 PM, Lee Hunter wrote:
>
> > As a new member of the documentation team and this mailing list, I
> > wanted to introduce myself and then ask you folks about the particular
> > itch that I'd like to scratch.
> >
> > I've been a writer and editor for over thirty years, that includes
> > seven as the founder and managing editor of a specialized computer
> > magazine and for the last eight years or so I've been a technical
> > editor in the software industry. Much of my recent work has involved
> > editing documentation for enterprise web and back-end applications.
> > The largest project I've done was editing the Adobe Acrobat 8 SDK
> > which was 30 odd books covering roughly 10,000 pages of deathless
> > prose.
> >
> > I've been keenly interested in CMS applications since the Frontier
> > days and actually did a little volunteer editing on The Zope Book but
> > its only recently that someone has been foolish enough to actually pay
> > me to set up a real CMS from scratch. Using Drupal, of course.
> >
> > So that brings me to my itch. I've been puzzled and a little
> > frustrated by the way the Drupal doc set is organized. I'm used to
> > seeing documentation that is organized first by audience or role and
> > then by groups of related tasks or objectives. In other words, you'll
> > typically see an admin guide, user guide, developer guide etc and
> > within, say, the admin guide you'll have a chapter called something
> > like "Managing Users" which brings together all the overview and
> > procedural information that the admin will need to be successful in
> > adding, removing, modifying user data. Each chapter typically has an
> > overview which explains what is in the chapter and perhaps provides
> > any conceptual information that might be needed to carry out the
> > procedures.
> >
> > In the case of Drupal, it seems that admin and site building
> > information is jumbled together in no particular order. I would think
> > that all the administration information (managing backups, users,
> > Apache, databases, general Drupal settings etc.) should go in a
> > separate document and all the non-developer stuff about building your
> > own Drupal site (themes, creating content types, CCK, Views etc.)
> > should go together. Related tasks need to be grouped together in
> > something like a chapter or section and placed in a logical sequence.
> >
> > I was  thinking that I should just put this in the issue queue along
> > with a tentative set of TOCs but because I'm relatively new to the
> > community and this
> >         would really be a major change in the information
> > architecture,
> >          I thought I'd raise it here first in case I'm duplicating
> > other efforts or proposing something that has already been examined
> > and discarded. Or possibly there's another way that I should be
> > proceeding.
> >
> > Anybody have any thoughts? Is this worth pursuing?
> >
> > Lee Hunter
> > --
> > Pending work: http://drupal.org/project/issues/documentation/
> > List archives: http://lists.drupal.org/pipermail/documentation/
>
> --
> Pending work: http://drupal.org/project/issues/documentation/
> List archives: http://lists.drupal.org/pipermail/documentation/
>