GSoC 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.

For those not familiar with the idea, the Help and Curated/Official Documentation System page has recently been updated with a 3-phase plan. The first phase will be to deploy Conditional Text and the Help/Map Entities as the Curated/Official Documentation System, either on Drupal.org itself or a sub-site (like help.drupal.org, but this hasn't been decided yet). Then, the (to be formed) Official Curated Documentation Team will be able to start work on a really great and well-structured manual for site building in Drupal, and other documentation they/we decide is essential. Also, contributed module and theme developers will be able to exercise editorial control over their official manuals.

The second phase will add additional features to the site, and eventually the hope of the third phase is to be able to build a site using Drupal, and import the documentation topics from the Curated Docs site as your site's administrative help (to replace the current core Help module, as well as several competing contributed help modules, such as Advanced Help).

If you're interested in helping with the writing of the Official Documentation, we'll be forming teams when the site is up. Watch here for an announcement!

If you're interested in helping with the code development, the one missing piece that we still need to build for Phase 1 is the workflow and editing permissions module, which could possibly be based on the Workflow or Revisions modules (also check the implementation section at the end for more ideas). Let me know if you'd like to take this on!