With View 2 completely stable and Views 3 in its firsts alpha releases, it would be nice to start to discuss how should be documented Views 3.
AS we know, there is three group of users for views, Developers, Themes, and web Designers.
Views 2 has a pretty good documentation for Themers and Designers, however know "How to" create a new handler, or a field handler, or a plugin is not so well documented.
For other side, a lots of UI changes has been included in Views 3, they are not stable yet, but they will. This implies a modification in the images of views help.
I have some ideas to put in views 3 documentation, and would be nice if each of you give your opinions.
For Developers:
-
Add more comments to handlers, there is a lot of methods that are not documented, or are documented in the parent classes. Maybe we can define some kind of "Redefinition of:" like drupal does with "Implementation of hook_*"
-
Add some foo handlers very well documented to explain how to create a field, filter and relationship handler, and maybe some plugins like exposed forms or style plugins.
-
Document all the missing hooks of views. There is some hooks that are not documented.
For designers:
- Create some views step by step to guide new users in the creation of their firsts views. (Maybe we can provide some videos too)
For themers
- Maybe we can create a kind of FAQ with the usual question collected from the views issue queue.
Ok, right now I don't have more comments, I would like to know your opinions about this topic.
Cheers!
Comments
I guess my opinion would be,
I guess my opinion would be, if someone can fill in some of the missing pieces for Views 2 it would have a multiplier effect, because these people will then be able to help others in some way, once Views 3 is released. Will Views 3 even be released at the same time as D7?
There is an audience of Drupal module developers who would like to use Views in their code. These people are not core developers or anywhere near that level, so there tends to be a "doughnut hole" of information.
If you Google search drupal.org for Views issues across all modules, you can get a sense for what all of these issue are.
In my case, it's the "one to many / duplicate fields" (aka 1:N JOIN / repeated rows) briefly mentioned in Advanced Help, but not covered in any tutorial. I know which Views code to look at to solve this, but I would get further along more quickly if there were tutorials.
I had promised myself if I figure out more, I would write a tutorial on what I know. I imagine a lot of people say the same thing :-) which is why I think it's so important to target the bigger user base.
As developer
I see a lack of docs about architecture, workflow and really also about writing handlers.
I think that dev-docs should start with workflow (for example http://drupal.org/node/10902)
Then we can visualize and describe hooks and ONLY then handlers
A good writeup about changes between views 2 and 3 could help more modules to be ported, so I think a good docs for developers is more important then for Themes and web Designers which could be done latter.