New initiative

How did you first get involved with contributing to the Drupal project? If you're like me, it was at a DrupalCon contribution day, where a wonderful mentor guided me through the pitfalls of joining in to our global project. But not everyone has the chance to attend a DrupalCon or other event with mentors, so many people instead try to navigate through the "Getting Involved Guide" on drupal.org to figure out how they can contribute.

I've made a few posts here in the Documentation group on groups.drupal.org over the past few years about the Help Topics experimental module. Today, I have a very brief update on the project, and a call for help in editing/reviewing the topics for the new Help Topics system!

Hello documentation folks!

There is an initiative that is starting to think about how best to restructure the sections of drupal.org (Community and Getting Involved) that are aimed at getting people involved in the community and becoming contributors to the project. Well, actually it's not a new initiative -- it was started a few years ago, but it stalled and is getting restarted.

If you're interested, discussions are happening in the #documentation channel in Slack, and in these two issues:
https://www.drupal.org/project/content/issues/1414988

Starting in Drupal 4.x, I think, Drupal Core had a capability for a module to provide 1 help topic (which we now in Drupal 8 call a "module overview"), and to add a small amount (typically) of help text at the top of one or more admin pages.

New in Drupal 8, modules and themes have the capability of also providing "tours", which are guided tours of their administrative pages, via the core Tour module.

Joe Shindelar (eojthebrave) has made a proposal that we add videos to the User Guide! We're soliciting input on this proposal on this issue:
https://www.drupal.org/project/user_guide/issues/2923453
There's a sample video linked in the issue summary on that page.

Please take a look at the proposal and sample video, and respond on the issue if you have comments or questions. (You can add comments here too, but on the issue is preferred.) Thanks!

Every time someone does a survey of "What does the Drupal project need?", Documentation comes out as one of the top results, even though we have a large amount of Community Documentation and a comprehensive developer reference with topic pages. One key problem is that for Drupal newcomers, the sheer amount of documentation is overwhelming, and what we have is somewhat lacking in organization, so they don't know where to start in order to learn how to use Drupal.

To mitigate this problem, the Documentation Working Group is proposing to create a new Drupal 8 User Guide, with funding (hopefully) from a Community Cultivation Grant from the Drupal Association.

We're posting the entire proposal below.... We'd love to hear from you between now and June 19, at which point we'll apply for grant funding. Please let us know:
- What do you think of the idea?
- Do you have any suggestions?
- Are you interested in being part of the team that develops the initial manual?

Note: June 19 has passed, and this post is now closed to comments. Thanks for all of the suggestions and offers to help! We'll be in touch!

This post contains a follow up to the proposal here as well as some information about how we're planning to proceed with this project based on all the excellent feedback we received: https://groups.drupal.org/node/472728

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.