With Drupalcon coming up soon, (and thanks to the prompting of rfay on IRC) I wanted to start a thread to share some thoughts about what might be happening from a docs perspective.
The Drupalcon site is a little confusing because they talk about doc sprints on both Sunday and Thursday, (http://sf2010.drupal.org/conference/drupal-sprints) but then on the same page it just shows one sprint on Thursday. So my first question, is there actually a docs sprint on Sunday? I'll be around on Sunday myself, so I'd be happy to participate if there's something happening.
Also related to sprinting, are there pre-sprint tasks that can we can do like targeting tasks or problem areas?
We had a page for the DC Drupalcon sprint which I've pulled from the archive and renamed for San Francisco: http://drupal.org/node/388470. The parent of that page has some general info about doc sprints http://drupal.org/node/424194.
Outside the sprint(s), it would be great if people with an interest in the Drupal docs could do some BoF stuff to talk about plans, tools, issues, d7 and beyond, and docs.drupal.org.
Comments
Planning for higher-level objectives
I'd be interested in doing some planning and thinking about higher-level issues as well:
Doc Sprint at DrupalCon
Adding my +1 to clarification on Drupalcon Documentation Sprint.
I'll be there
I was planning to be around as much as I have energy for on both sprint days. Happy to help people get oriented and such. My suspicion is that they are anticipating a lot more people to be around for Sunday sprints than Thursday. If there are fewer people around Thursday, we can always gasp hang with the devs. ;-)
Sprints...
From what I've heard, there will be sprints both Thursday and Sunday, but they don't have the convention center for Sunday so they may not know where yet (cutting it close if they don't know yet, IMO!). I have no problem with having the devs and docs in the same room -- in fact, for those of us coder-doc people, it might even make sense.
My opinion is that we should focus on http://drupal.org/node/515870 (D7 docs tasks) for the sprints, unless we have some other well-defined tasks to take on. There should be plenty there to work on. Over-arching discussions, IMO, are not good material for sprints. We'll have people who are new to doc, and need definite tasks for them.
On the coding-doc side, there is definitely plenty for any sized group that shows up on the D7 To Do list, plus plenty of D6 issues that can also be patched if by some miracle we run out of D7 issues (or if there are folks more comfortable with D6). I'll be happy to herd the coder-doc cats as I did last year at DCDC. I'll be arriving in SF at 8:30 AM that Thursday morning at Oakland airport, so I'll probably be at Moscone by 9:30 or so -- which isn't perfect, but I think it'll do. Thursday evening I'm flying out around 8pm, so that should also be OK.
Maybe the Handbook folks can get organized also about tasks that need doing there too? I'm not so sure about the status of the Handbook... Last year I think there were about 5 tables of non-coder doc writers. It would probably be good if there were tasks for Drupal newbies (like trying out tutorials to see if they work) through Drupal experts (like writing documentation for the xyz module in Drupal 7). Just a thought...
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Quick thoughts
I definitely want to have a list of bite-sized tasks for folks to dig into and some cat-herders to guide new folks, as is standard fair for a doc sprint. In addition, to address the opportunity to have higher level discussions, I am wondering if it makes sense to pick a few topics that we would like to brainstorm on while a lot of us are in the same place. We could then actually schedule a day/time for discussion on topic X. This way, folks that may not necessarily doing doc sprinting all day could make sure they can be part of the conversation. It would also "protect" a certain slice of time to make sure some of these things get discussed rather than trying to track people down during the day and never getting to it. A rough list of the things I'm thinking about are:
Other topics? Thoughts on setting specific time/place to discuss these? We could also try doing these as BoFs during the conference itself. I should also note that I'm pretty free during the conference and for the Thursday sprint, but I will be out of pocket on Sunday because Lullabot has training sessions running all day.
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D7 database layer
I've been wanting to get involved in the docs project for a while. I'll be in SF next week and can come by some time Sunday afternoon, so maybe I can start there.
I was recently playing with a D7 site at home and ran into the issue of what replaces db_fetch_array/object() in D7. I have very little experience with OOP and there was even less doc on what you do with the output from db_query(). I had to follow the D7 api into some modules to see that you append a ->function_name after db_query. It was not a friendly process, to say the least.
So maybe while I'm learning this aspect of the D7 database layer, I can write it all down from the perspective of somebody who is very comfortable with the D6 database api and trying to learn D7 and OO stuff at the same time. If I do this on the side over the next couple of weeks, then I can either post it online or here where some folks can look it over.
I'll watch here to see where to go on Sunday, or I assume they will have it posted somewhere there.
Check the Handbook
http://drupal.org/node/310069 has a complete guide to the D7 database API.
Drupal programmer - http://poplarware.com
Drupal author - http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920034612.do
Drupal contributor - https://www.drupal.org/u/jhodgdon
There is also a DBTNG Example module
The handbook documentation is quite good, although it still needs improvement.
The Examples for Developers project also has a DBTNG example. You can browse it on api.drupal.org.
It needs quite a number of more sophisticated examples (issue) so your help would be appreciated on that as well.
How would I find this?
So if I go to the api, click on Database Abstraction Layer, and then the D7 tab, I don't see any link to the wonderful node 310069. Maybe posting good documentation needs to be matched by making sure it is easily accessible? Or did I miss something?
Ah. now I see that if you scroll to the very bottom, somebody has added a comment with a link to it. I guess I never found that. How would I find the developer examples?
See you all on Sunday.
Please make a patch to add the link on Sunday
Hi - You can definitely submit a patch to fix that up on Sunday. It's a great idea.
The problem is that the API docs are generated from core code, which is not always brought up to date with the handbook.