[documentation] Drupal handbooks IA work begins

[Addison Berry]

> add1sun has posted a Discussion at http://groups.drupal.org/node/25334
>
> Drupal handbooks IA work begins
> ---------------
> The top priority in the Drupal documentation roadmap (http://drupal.org/node/488070 
> ) that was published earlier this summer was to reorganize the  
> information architecture (IA) of the handbooks to make them easier  
> to use and maintain. Becca Scollan volunteered to take the lead and  
> she has been researching and building out a plan of attack. We are  
> now at a good stage to start doing some work that the whole  
> community can engage in. Instead of trying to tackle the whole  
> thing, our first foray will be limited to the Theming Guide handbook  
> (http://drupal.org/theme-guide) only. We are going to begin looking  
> at and tagging our existing content with an eye towards a new way of  
> thinking about it. We have added some new vocabularies to just the  
> pages in the theming handbook and we need folks to go through and  
> assign terms. Instead of just random tagging, we need to keep some  
> overall concepts in mind. There are guidelines (http://drupal.org/node/548322 
> ) that can be referred to, so that the terms we use will be most  
> useful for the following steps in the process.

> For a quick overview of where we are headed, we are looking to move  
> our documentation into a topic-based system (http://dita.xml.org/topic-based-authoring 
> ). This is using the underlying theory behind the Darwin Information  
> Typing Architecture (DITA), even though we aren't using the XML  
> itself (at least not for now). The general idea is to present  
> information with some structure, having each piece of content be  
> focused around a "topic." The core DITA topic types are tasks,  
> concepts, and references. As content is written in this manner, you  
> can then use a variety of maps to display the topics in ways that  
> make sense for different use cases. Before we can dive deeply into  
> this for the Drupal handbooks, we need to see what we have and how  
> things may or may not map out. The new vocabularies allow for  
> freetagging, but we are also looking to categorize the content into  
> these core topic types. You can read a bit more about this on the  
> guidelines page (http://drupal.org/node/548322).

> I'm excited about this work, not only because we are starting to get  
> our hands dirty, but because this will be valuable experience as we  
> start to learn about and rethink conceptual models of how  
> documentation gets done. If you want to help out and learn as well,  
> please review the guidelines (http://drupal.org/node/548322), ask  
> questions and dig in to the Theming Guide. We will have an open  
> question and answer period (http://groups.drupal.org/node/25335) in  
> #drupal-docs on IRC, on the Freenode network, at 2 p.m. EDT (find  
> your time: http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?month=8&day=18&year=2009&hour=14&min=0&sec=0&p1=419) 
>  on Tuesday, August 18. If you can't make that meeting, feel free to  
> catch myself (add1sun) or Becca (beccascollan) on IRC at other  
> times, or you can  create an issue in the documentation issue queue (http://drupal.org/project/issues/documentation 
> ).

> Cross-posted on rocktreesky.com.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.drupal.org/pipermail/documentation/attachments/20090814/2300dbc8/attachment.htm>