[documentation] Proposal of HandBook and CVS documentationchanges!

Fri May 1 13:46:54 UTC 2009

--- On Mon, 4/27/09, Mike Parisi <mgparisi at rochester.rr.com> wrote:

From: Mike Parisi <mgparisi at rochester.rr.com>
Subject: Re: [documentation] Proposal of HandBook and CVS documentationchanges!
To: "A list for documentation writers" <documentation at drupal.org>
Date: Monday, April 27, 2009, 10:02 PM

Going through these documents, I can find allot of "out of scope" information.  I think we can trim out this information to make these documents shorter.  People don’t want to read long documents, and do not.  Please see http://drupal.org/node/446654#comment-1526984 for an example of were I think this is pushing the limits of what is in scope.  In fact allot of this information has nothing to do with CVS access at all!

This document maybe moved, but it wont ever be deleted.  It needs allot of attention and the hand of a true writer.

It is clear that there is some frustration over the application process for CVS access.  That people are not reading it all.  Yet bloating the document makes things worse, not better.  We need the best of the best of the Doc Team to come in and re-do this.  A good writer will say more in less words.  I tend to try and write more to cover all aspects of a topic.  Thus I tend to bloat a document to include things that maybe obvious to others.

In the end, the person maintaining CVS access will always get bad CVS requests.  I feel this is a crucial area of Drupal that requires a person who has a very patient attitude.  Getting people to Contrib. is probably one of the most important aspects of the website and community.  I will ask that I am not apart of the people who review's these requests because I know I have the patience of a (thinking of some analogy)... Spitting Cobra!  A-HA!

Mike

From: Addison Berry 
Sent: Monday, April 27, 2009 5:07 PM
To: A list for documentation writers 
Subject: Re: [documentation] Proposal of HandBook and CVS documentationchanges!

Yeah, this stuff has been in need of a "do-over" for a while generally. I will say though that these *were* more consolidated when the Getting Involved book was created. I have reverted the moves that have happened since then to re-consolidate them, for the time-being. That is, I have moved Drupal and CVS back to the Getting Involved guide, and I moved the Start/Maintain a Module back under the Contribute Code section. We definitely have some large architectural issues in the handbook and we also do not have any clear way to "control" it, even if we set it, since different people see things being organized in different ways and we have no restrictions on book organizational changes at the moment. 

I would ask that folks hold off making big location changes in the documentation for the time-being, unless it is discussed on the list or in an issue in the doc queue first, with broad consensus that it "just makes sense." The reason for this is that I will be making a really big announcement in the next two weeks about the overall docs roadmap and one of the biggest pieces of that will be the IA (information architecture) of all Drupal docs. We have an IA person who has volunteered to lead the project (and everyone will be encouraged to be a part of it). Once we get some preliminary stuff taken care of and I can articulate all of this stuff in a meaningful way about how we can move forward, I'll be posting to the doc list and then making a front page post on Drupal.org.

Mike, thanks for bringing this up, as it is very important and something we need to really figure out a long-term solution for, so I hope you will keep digging in to this and giving us feedback.

Thanks all :-)
Addi

On Apr 27, 2009, at 4:38 PM, Mike Parisi wrote:

I know this post wont be perfect, and I don’t mean to insult anyone.  If I do its completely unintentional and due to a statement that was probably a bit skewed.

I have been beating my head over CVS for MONTHS.  Partially because the documentation is scattered and not organized.  Often times you read a document and it mentions allot of specifics (But not all) about CVS.  What you need is missing, for example a major document on CVS contribute does not contain other CVS utilities, while these are located in another section of the site.  This leaves the reader feeling empty and also leaves us not looking elsewhere.  This also bloats pages so that users feel daunted by the tasks required.

I propose a major change in the structure of these sections for many reasons.  The most prominent one is that the information is scattered across 3 separate area's!

http://drupal.org/node/10259
http://drupal.org/node/7765
http://drupal.org/handbook/cvs 

I think that many of these pages are bloated duplicate information and thus are not read!  This is evident in the http://drupal.org/cvs-application/requirements contains the following statement: 

"If you just scrolled down this page to the apply link and didn't read the page, don't expect to get a CVS account. It seems many people are doing just that and submitting poor motivation messages resulting in a high decline rate."

Well this is probably because people can not find the information they need, and the page contains everything from CVS information to Coding Standards information.  I will fix a few problems I have found with the current structure, but this is very complex set of documentation with allot of overlapping information and unclear navigation.

One proposal is that much of the information should (or is) included in the http://drupal.org/handbook/cvs, and removed from the handbook.  Instead a sub page in the handbook that specifically talks about CVS and Coding Standards should be added to the handbook.  That adds a quick over-view of why CVS and Coding Standards and where to find the information needed.  It is important 

Finding the documents is confounded because Druplicons "cvs?" command is unclear at best and does not include all three links above.
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THANKS FROM STANLEY-----

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