Documentation Team

I'm going to be working on a push for help with the D7 docs in the next little bit and thought it might be helpful to register a proper Docs Twitter account https://twitter.com/drupaldocs to announce sprints, ask for help with specific tasks, point out major discussions that happen, etc.

If anyone else wants the password so they can use the account, just send me a message or ping me on IRC and (as long as I know who you are) I'm happy to have multiple people use it.

This summer, we are doing a project in which we learn Drupal/Open Source skills while helping gardening initiatives. Participants will build Drupal projects that foster "Garden Storytelling." Technically, we might create: recipes for Drupal sites, glue modules, and simple sites that act as web services. Our audience is primarily Drupallers & Community Gardeners. There are about 40 participants overall, half of whom are already involved with Drupal in some form.

An important part of what we will be learning will be documentation.

Just had a bit of a lightbulb moment (and maybe this idea has come up before?) about how to eventually kill comments on handbook pages. Someone asked how we could make sure conversations about a particular page were still visible if they were happening in the issue queue instead of as comments.

I thought, and this is what seemed like a good idea:

• add a field on the issue node-add form for a referenced d.o NID (to reference the handbook page the issue is about)
• build a view block for the handbook pages that displays any issues related to the page

Ta-da?

Per a conversation at the documentation BOF about how we are approaching managing documentation at CSU Monterey Bay, here's a screencast and additional information about our approach. Sorry it's been a week, but after the figurative "Drupal Fever" of last week I had a literal fever that laid me up for a while.

LeeHunter organized a BOF gathering today at DrupalCon San Francisco related to his thread here about building an awesome technical communication system.

Here are my notes from the session. Enjoy, discuss, etc. They are a bit rough, but hopefully readable...

Lee's Goal: Make a tech communication platform that everyone will want to use, based on Drupal

Addison's Goal: docs.drupal.org, new IA, new tools (not necessarily the same thing as Lee's platform)

Come by to help with docs, I'll Photoshop (actually "skitch") you into the picture!

We'll be in 305 after lunch.

I just noticed this group: http://groups.drupal.org/beginner-documentation because someone started cross posting to the (recently opened) main docs group: http://groups.drupal.org/documentation-team

I'm not sure who's actually keeping tabs on this beginner docs group, but I wonder if it wasn't created because of the main docs group having been closed to posting prior to a month or so ago. Anyhow, it seems pretty redundant and the docs team aren't monitoring it as far as I know, so I'm thinking it'd be nice to merge it into the main docs group.

I organized some Drupal 7 documentation sprints the last few Tuesdays (http://groups.drupal.org/node/50403)... They were successful, in that we got a couple of new people going in documentation, and a few patches filed (I'll shout out to trevjs especially, for coming to all of the sprints and patiently working on some patches).

However, the sprints were not very well attended, and we still have a lot to do to get the documentation of Drupal 7 ready for its release (http://drupal.org/node/515870), so I'm wondering how we can get it done.

My questions: