Posted by techgirlgeek on April 20, 2012 at 4:31pm
So, during my Learn Sprint last night we came across a few details that the lessons were missing. What is the best way to collect feedback for these lessons?
- Issue queue on Project learn?
- Comment on the lesson?
- Comment in the group?
Comments
What about right here? :)
What about right here? :)
g.d.o polls and d.o issue queue
Agree with @jeffschuler about using g.d.o for feedback (at least until there's a way to do that on learndrupal.org that's not likely confuse people).
Polls with comments might be a good way to collect and discuss feedback here (on specific questions) as a group. It might help consolidate and clarify the places where the lessons could be simplified or improved?
Once lesson issues are identified, patches to lessons could be added to the Learn d.o issue queue (until there's some other way to do this? ATM content is exported into features within that project).
@techgirlgeek today you mentioned some other feedback you received about the learndrupal.org process - apart from just the lesson content (like confusion with the 'completed' flag). To me it seems things like that could even go straight to the d.o issue queue?
refining lessons/workflow - great to see this discussion!
Thanks for kicking off the discussion here regarding the workflow for refining lessons. The process is, like everything on a new project, still "in process" -- far from figured out.
One item to add to the mix here is that lessons can also be edited on learningdrupal.org and exported. There are questions around how making/reviewing changes on the site should be handled (tools for the minimal viable product that we're shooting to complete by Drupalcon Munich are necessarily very basic).
For now, how's this as an attempt to extend the outline that's taking shape in this thread?
As I'm sure you'll agree, an important aspect of whatever process we adopt will be allowing as many volunteers to be involved as possible -- the project should be as inclusive as possible.
Interested to get your additional thoughts/additions.
Kay - Lessons project maintainer
changes should not be made on the site
@kay_v re #1 above: changes to lessons (even uncontroversial onces) should not be made directly on drupalladder.org… because they will be blown away the next time the feature holing that content gets reverted. From what i can see the way content gets deployed now requires every change be added in code, after whatever editorial workflow
changes to the site are necessary - approach to address concerns
@scottrigby and all - seems we might be able to take into account the use of Features updates in the workflow; if for some reason we were not using the site for lesson writing and updates, we would be taking away a major reason for the site's existence.
Please give your thoughts on whether the following addresses the stated concerns and whether you see issues/opportunities with the proposed workflow.
Regarding the concern (going from memory): Lessons are in their own Feature, which should ideally be recreated when new Lesson content is available. Other Features on drupalladder.org can be updated/recreated without affecting the Lesson Feature.
Quick flow outline for items affecting Lesson Feature on drupalladder.org (to illustrate the way the concern would be addressed):
Updates to other Features are outside this cycle; ideally any mistakes (since it's easy to make them with Features) can be corrected with backups (best practice before making significant changes, in any case).
Insights?
Concerns and Thoughts
I've been mulling over this issue since it came up again on Monday, because I'm still not sure how I feel about how things are handled now. In particular, storing the lesson content in a Feature module still doesn't seem quite right to me; do we expect that other people are going to want to setup their own instances of DrupalLadder.org and its content? I wouldn't expect anyone to, but can't think of another reason to store the content in code. However, I recognize that things like that were discussed and decided long before I got involved, so I know that there are reasons and explanations to which I'm not privy, so I'm not worried about it.
I'm going to assume for the moment that the content will remain where it is, and in that case, I think this is definitely a better workflow than what we've got now. In terms of process, perhaps a few people could take on the maintainer role mentioned in #1 and keep an eye on content updates that come in. Maybe we could plan on doing a regular monthly export of the
learn_lesson_contentmodule, to get content updates back into the repo on a regular basis.I wonder too, though, if we could—should—employ a moderation module like Workflow or Workbench. I've never used either (and I'm sure there are other options), but something like the screenshot on the Workbench Moderation project page is what I had in mind: a way to review node revisions before publishing them.
Does anyone here have experience with these or other content moderation solutions? Would this be an appropriate tool in our case?
Looks like there are a few
Looks like there are a few different questions emerging from this thread, and I'm not sure the best way to separate them here. Maybe it's best to just lay out what I'm seeing:
Is there anything I missed?
Once again, I was mulling
Once again, I was mulling this over a bit and then neglected to come back to it later in the day, so I'm sorry I haven't responded sooner.
I think there might be some misunderstanding here, and Scott, it's either me or you :-P The way I understood Kay's comment about the doc pages was not that we would put this content on d.o doc pages, but that we might want to mirror the workflow they use. I hope that Kay can chime in here and clarify for us, but I don't believe that we should be putting lessons on d.o. If anything, lessons on DrupalLadder.org can link to or reference handbook pages that have step-by-step instructions, because there's no need to duplicate existing content. But, I think it would be more confusing for regular site users if, upon finding an error in a lesson on DrupalLadder.org, they were directed to a handbook page back on d.o to offer fixes to it. I think that process would get unwieldy fast.
So that addresses where content should live, or my opinion on it anyway. As for workflow: I'm still not entirely clear on the full workflow of d.o handbook pages, but I'm OK with doing whatever it is they're doing because it seems to be working just fine. Is anyone familiar enough with this to detail the flow, including admin/maintainer approvals or rollbacks or whatever? Is there a quick and easy way to implement this workflow, or maybe a module that does it?
Yep it was my interpretive
Yep it was my interpretive response to kay_v's comment =)
However, I think it's not a bad idea to merge efforts between drupal ladder static (handbook-like) pages with similar pages in the d.o. handbooks. Skillcompass does this by adding an "external learning resource" (creates an iframe to a URL, some of which point to handbook pages on d.o).
About the d.o handbook editing process - it's pretty straightforward at this point. Take a d.o handbook page like Installing Git - any auth user can edit it, and the process of rolling back to a previous revision just requires an additional role with permission to do that.
Arguably, this page on drupalladder.org - Install Git is a duplicate of that d.o page. As it is now, any improvements found for the drupalladder equivalent should probably also be made on d.o (and vice versa… how would the improvements to each page be kept in sync?).
I think the unique contribution that drupal ladder makes is it's course-like style… helping to guide new users move through a linear progress toward a learning objective (this is also where it differs from skillcompass, which is not linear at all). But I don't think the content in the ladder lessons needs to be different from the same material in the d.o handbooks.
That last paragraph is, to
That last paragraph is, to me, exactly what makes this project different from others like it. I definitely like the idea of adding a link field for external resources (or "additional reading" or whatever we call it) like skillcompass has.
It sounds to me like the d.o doc method would work well: allow anyone to edit Lesson nodes, but require special rights to roll back to previous versions. Then we just need to have moderators to keep an eye on things and clean up when necessary. I'm sure we could build a view to show the most recently-changed lessons, so that moderators can check in every few days and review updated lessons. And, it won't require any new modules, just some permission changes.
I think we should go with that method for now. It's not as robust as what specialized modules like Workbench or Workflow offer, but more importantly, it's a lot better than the non-process we've got now.
Sound good?
Comments on Lessons
[I decided to split this off into a comment of its own to make it easier for us to conduct a couple separate threads of discussion about things]
Till now, site users have been leaving comments with tips, additional details, questions, etc. Once we DO start updating the content in the lessons, what should become of these? I'm never a fan of destroying data, but I think it might be best to delete comments when the raised issue has been addressed, mistake corrected, or whatever. Perhaps we could include a list of contributors, like the community docs on d.o, but that's not something I don't think we should spend much time and energy on it.
community docs on d.o as workflow model? let's discuss here?
Would you all agree that the community docs pages on drupal.org provide a reasonable workflow pattern?
Seems we would have common goals: gather contributions, fold them together into a (sufficiently) polished 'product' and keep the refresh rate up.
Thoughts?
d.o handbooks FTW!
Great idea! IMO the current d.o community docs would be a great place to do this… there the comments could be more focused on improving the content (and support requests can be directed to the drupalladder.org or the appropriate IRC channel - and bugs can go to the issue queue).
This could have the added benefit of not duplicating how-tos that arguably belong in the d.o handbooks anyway (and lessen the horror of trying to keep those in sync with content on drupalladder.org).
Note the d.o book page editorial workflow probably only works for static lesson content, rather than other pieces of (future) lessons, like videos, quizzes, etc. Not sure how that should work, but we can cross that bridge when we have a Course feature branch to look at and think about.
Handbook Pages
There are two related issues here. One is editorial workflow, how do we improve, add, provide discussion, and approve content in an unobtrusive way, so people using the content can continue to do so unobstructed by controversy etc. Actually, this sounds remarkably like a "talk" page like you find on a wiki would be well suited. It provides discussion re: the content of a given lesson/page in place. I don't have a lot to add specifically except it's a fairly simple architectural addition.
The other issue, which I DO have an opinion about is regarding the content itself. IMO a large portion of ladder content either already exists or really belongs in the d.o handbook pages and not the ladder site. Creating a separate set of pages with instructions on an external site essentially amounts to forking the documentation. I think if we're training the next generation of core developers, Druplication is not a behavior we want them to emulate.
One example comes to mind illustrating some of the problems. Webchick was using the patch reroll documentation on ladder, but when she had things to add/change about the content, she had little choice but to create a new page on d.o. using the instructions developed on ladder as a starting point.
She provided attribution, including a link to the ladder page, but the circumstances put her in an awkward position. She's obviously all for creating quality documentation, but having development process documentation NOT on d.o doesn't make much sense. Also, even if she DID want to edit the content on the ladder site, she did not have those privileges anyway.
There's a whole lot of content already in d.o handbooks which would make excellent additions to a well rounded Drupal curriculum. It makes little sense to re-invent the wheel and create new documentation which already exists on d.o. I'm sure the documentation team would appreciate any assistance we could provide. If a handbook page needs improvement, most can be edited by anyone with an account. Issues with "controversial" content have often already been hashed out by the people involved in writing or maintaining the related code.
I'm sure I should summarize here, but I can't think of anything else to add. At any rate, it's my two cents... Can we please use d.o handbook pages?