Welcome! This group is the main location for news and discussions about what Drupal community members are doing to improve Drupal documentation. If you join this group, you'll be signed up to receive email notifications; you can change your preferences on your account page. You can also subscribe to posts via RSS (check the sidebar of this page), and via email using the links at the bottom of this page.
The Documentation Team leadership also puts out quarterly status posts that appear in the Drupal.org home page news (these posts are meant for the entire Drupal community, not just the Documentation Team). The Drupal.org home page news has an RSS feed too.
You can find more information about how to contribute to documentation on Drupal.org. There's also information there about the Documentation team leadership and other means of communication. Join us!
Call for Community Docs Moderator volunteers
In an issue from late in 2011, we made it possible for anyone to upload images and use IMG and TABLE tags in their doc pages and comments on Drupal.org. Today, in a follow-up issue, we took away the old Documentation input format, and made all of the book pages that had that input format have Filtered HTML instead, meaning anyone can edit them. Hooray!
Read moreSeeking Assistant or Co-Leader for Docs Team
Ariane has just officially left her position as the co-leader of the Drupal Documentation Team, leaving me as the sole leader (see http://drupal.org/node/1402190)... I've agreed to stay on as Leader for the time being, but since I've been acting in a leadership role in the Documentation Team for a couple of years, and with the official title for more than a year, I'd like to put a time limit on my tenure as Documentation Team Leader.
Read more
Multi-lingual documentation?
Can the Community Media documentation be translated to other languages? Once the Comminuty Media theme is ready for its first official release I'm thinking of maybe translating some documentation to Swedish, for other Swedish channels to use Drupal and Community Media.
Wanted: Feedback for docs writers
The other day at the docs office hours, it occured to me that there really is no good way of knowing how documentation you put in the docs wiki is received. I didn't think much more about it then, but the thought has grown and I now think it's a serious problem.
(When I say "feedback" I don't necessarily mean written statements, but also things like usage statistics.)
Feedback serves two really important purposes:
- It's a motivator. When you see that things you created (or participated in creating) are being used, it's encouraging.
Documentation Office Hours June 19
See when this meeting happens in your time zone.
Join the Documentation Team for our regular "office hours" meeting in the #drupal-docs IRC channel. We usually meet on the first Tuesday of the month at 9 AM US/Pacific time and the third Tuesday of the month at 4pm US/Pacific time to discuss:
- Writing and editing Drupal documentation -- you can help!
- Improving infrastructure and tools for Drupal documentation -- your input is valuable!
- Volunteering and recruiting volunteers for Drupal Documentation
Drupal Docs "merit badge"?
This idea has been batted about recently a bit in IRC and in-person discussions, but I thought I'd post it here:
Should we create a "Drupal Documentation Merit Badge"?
Read moreOfficial Docs/Help System: Get ready for a grant?
The Drupal Association has just announced Community Cultivation Grants for 2012, and I'd like to get the Documentation Team ready to apply for one at the end of the summer. If you're a Drupal site builder or a module developer, you can help!! Here's the plan:
Read moreBook "Drupal 7 – the Essentials" being added to the community wiki
I am very happy to announce that I (finally!) am publishing my book Drupal 7 – the Essentials in the documentation section on drupal.org!
The book covers basic and advanced site building with Drupal core, Views, Flag, Rules, Page manager and Panels. So far only "part A" (74 of 324 pages) are published, but I hope to finish it before the end of the week.
If you're curious, check out http://drupal.org/node/1576418.
Read moreDocumentation Office Hours June 5
See when this meeting happens in your time zone.
Join the Documentation Team for our regular "office hours" meeting in the #drupal-docs IRC channel. We usually meet on the first Tuesday of the month at 9 AM US/Pacific time and the third Tuesday of the month at 4pm US/Pacific time to discuss:
Read moreGSoC student working on Help/Curated Docs system!
I'm pleased to announce that Hungarian student Gergely Kurucz (temaruk) has been selected as a 2012 Google Summer of Code (GSoC) student for Drupal! His project is to build the Help Topic and Map entities for the Help and Curated/Official Documentation System. Gergely works with fellow Hungarian Tamás Demeter-Haludka (Yorirou), who built the Conditional Text module (another building block for the Help/Docs system) in last year's GSoC, so hopefully between Gergely, myself as the "official" mentor, and Tamás as the "nearby" unofficial mentor, we'll see great progress this summer.
Read moreDocumentation Office Hours May 15
See when this meeting happens in your time zone.
Join the Documentation Team for our regular "office hours" meeting in the #drupal-docs IRC channel. We usually meet on the first Tuesday of the month at 9 AM US/Pacific time and the third Tuesday of the month at 4pm US/Pacific time to discuss:
Read moreDocumentation Office Hours 1 May
See when this meeting happens in your time zone.
Join the Documentation Team for our regular "office hours" meeting in the #drupal-docs IRC channel. We usually meet on the first Tuesday of the month at 9 AM US/Pacific time and the third Tuesday of the month at 4pm US/Pacific time to discuss:
Read more
Upgrade Drupal.org to Drupal 7 Sprint!
The week of April 23 - April 27, the Drupal Association is sponsoring a sprint, hosted by the Oregon State University Open Source Lab, to upgrade Drupal.org from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7!
The sprint will be mainly focused on the following areas, and the following attendees will be there:
Read moreDocumentation Office Hours 17 April
See when this meeting happens in your time zone.
Join the Documentation Team for our regular "office hours" meeting in the #drupal-docs IRC channel. We usually meet on the first Tuesday of the month at 9 AM US/Pacific time and the third Tuesday of the month at 4pm US/Pacific time to discuss:
Read moreDocumentation Office Hours 10 April
See when this meeting happens in your time zone.
Join the Documentation Team for our regular "office hours" meeting in the #drupal-docs IRC channel. We usually meet on the first Tuesday of the month at 9 AM US/Pacific time and the third Tuesday of the month at 4pm US/Pacific time to discuss:
Read moreNew time(s) for office hours?
I'm thinking of changing the time for the weekly Docs Office Hours.
Motivations and considerations:
- It seems like a lot of our office hours participants lately are in Europe, and 1pm West Coast US time is pretty late for them. (Probably not for Asian participants either, and there have been a smattering of folks especially from India who have been interested.)
- It doesn't work well for some North American folks either, just by chance (like they happen to have a meeting at 1pm Tuesdays every week).
Docs Team Reboot: Focus on documentation infrastructure again!
Hello wonderful members of the Drupal Documentation Team!
Remember last fall, when we went through an amazing process of discussion and refinement for the Community Docs redesign? Putting aside what happened immediately afterwards (how long it took to get it actually deployed), do you remember how great it was when it was deployed finally? If not, take a look at a Community Documentation page, such as:
http://drupal.org/documentation/modules/dashboard
Are you interested in building up a multilingual Drupal Documentation site?
Documentation Office Hours Feb 28 - Moving forward with Curated Docs
Our next weekly Documentation Office Hours will be a discussion of how we can push forward with the plans for the "Curated Docs". Other Documentation Infrastructure discussions would also be welcome, but I'd like to concentrate on the Curated Docs. Please sign in and join the discussion!
See above for the time (hopefully in your time zone; if not, check your user profile). The discussion will take place in the #drupal-docs IRC channel.
Read moreProposal: Loosen rules regarding patches that may be backported during a stable release (7.x+)
It's great when we get newly injected energy into usability efforts in Drupal, as happened with the Drupal Usability Study at Google last week. However, these patches always run aground of various "freezes" we put in place in the stable release of Drupal:
- API freeze
- Don't commit patches that break backwards API compatibility within a stable release, for the benefit of contributed module and theme authors.
- String freeze
- Don't change any user-facing text (e.g. anything in a t() function), for the benefit of translation teams.
- UI freeze
- Don't commit patches that affect the user interface, for the benefit of the documentation team, as well as to not invalidate tutorials, screencasts, books, etc.
- Feature freeze
- Don't commit patches that add new features; stick only to bug fixes. Additional functionality gets added in contrib.
As far as I can tell, these guidelines are not actually written down anywhere, but simply passed down word-of-mouth from core generation to core generation. I want to do two things in this thread:
1) Create documentation around these guidelines.
2) Propose that we change these guidelines to make them looser and allow more classes of patches to be backported, particularly minor UI tweaks and string improvements.
Here's a proposal (co-developed by Dries, Moshe, Alex, and I), with the items in bold being ones that we propose to change, the rest being documented to the best of my current understanding. My hope is that this can both help is iterate faster on the core product, and also provide additional incentive for people helping with Drupal 8 core development, as there'd be a chance of them seeing their changes in a version of Drupal sooner than 18+ months away.
Read more
