DrupalCon CPH Docs Sprint

There will be a room set aside for Docs Team at the DrupalCon CPH code sprint tomorrow. I will do my best to be there for the day (stomach permitting), but in case I am very late (or only join virtually on IRC) or anyone is looking for an outline of what to work on, I thought it'd be good to put up some info to get started with if you are planning on attending. If you can get through prepping all of this before the sprint, you will have a head start once you get there, otherwise you will likely need to go through this info when you're getting started!

Etiquette

Take a deep breath - nobody is going to bite you... probably. ;-) Sprint day is fun and full of learning opportunities! That said, the developers will be hunkered down in groups around the sprint, so if you are working on documenting something that is related to their work, don't be scared to go talk to them. That said, they will be fairly focused and may not want to break their focus, so don't take it personally if they aren't able to stop what they're working on right that moment!

If you are new, best to sit near a more experienced Docs Team member, or with a developer who you can ask technical questions to, or even work on docs for their module/theme/part of core.

Orientation

Before you get started, if you don't have a lot of experience contributing to Drupal, I highly recommend watching this great video of David Strauss' (who is incidentally flying in for the sprint) session about contributing at DrupalCamp Dallas. It is an excellent crash course in how things work and how to get started, and covers most of the basics like IRC, issue queues, etc. If you don't watch it beforehand, I will probably just recommend you watch it when you get to the sprint!

There is also a ton of info you can dig through on the Contributors Guide

What you can help with

I'd love for us to focus on D7 docs priorities! If that seems daunting to you though, search the Docs queue for the Novice tag, or work on rolling comments (a necessary task that never gets enough attention!) - the list of pages with the most comments is here.

If you want to work on code documentation, you will need most of the tools below. But you can work on documentation that is on Drupal.org just via the web interface. You will still need to be able to install D7 and any modules you are working with somewhere if you're doing anything related to D7 docs so you can be sure your documentation matches what is happening, but it's not necessary to have it set up locally or to have command line access.

Aside from the Doc Team links that you will get in the sidebar on Drupal.org, here are some of the most useful links to get started working on documentation:

• High priority D7 docs to-do list
• Handbook Style Guide
• Getting started with Docs
• How to contribute to Docs
• Docs maintenance tasks
• Pages with comments to roll
• Docs Issue Queue

Tools

There are several tools that will be useful to set up:

IRC

IRC is the text based chat client that the Drupal community uses, and it will be quite handy during the sprint if you have an IRC client installed and working so you can communicate with the other people there, and anyone who is joining the sprint remotely. Docs sprint will be communicating mainly in the #drupal-docs channel.

There is a ton of info on how to set up IRC on d.o.

Your Drupal.org account

Be sure you have signed up for a user account on Drupal.org and then log in and go to your account (make sure you are on Drupal.org, not groups.drupal.org), click on the edit tab, and then check all the boxes in the block configuration section. This will give you some new blocks in the sidebar with links that are handy for accessing the issue queues. (This is reviewed in David's video as well.)

Setting up your dev/testing environment

To work on Drupal 7 Docs, you will need to be able to install and run a fresh version of the D7 HEAD (ie. the most up to date development version of the codebase) to do testing. This can be on an external server if you have command line access to one, but most developers will run Drupal locally for testing/development purposes - running locally = installing a server on your laptop.

There are instructions on how to set up a local server, so try your best to get through the set up before the sprint. If you are on a Mac, the most straightforward approach is to set up MAMP - these are great instructions to walk you through it.

Depending on how in depth you're going to get, if you are on Mac, you will also want to install Mac Developer Tools (Xcode) - this install is kind of large, so please do it before hand as it takes a while to download! (There are more detailed instructions here about installing and configuring Xcode, but depending on your level/fearlessness you may or may not want to delve in that intensely!)

Using command line

Scared of using command line? Well, no time better than the present to face your fears! Of course you can do testing by manually clicking and downloading, and moving files around, but that is going to be painfully slow. On Macs you will have an application called "Terminal" that will allow you to use command line to quickly update your code, make and change permissions on files, etc.

Here is a great how-to for command line but I think it is only for unix/linux.

A text/code editor

This is not necessary but it is a good idea to install some sort of text editor as well, so that you can open up the code and look at it, easily edit HTML, etc. There are several listed on this page. I use TextMate, but it's not that great. I know a lot of people like Komodo and Emacs, but what I can say about TextMate is that it has few bells and whistles, so it's pretty straightforward to get started.

Ok! I think that should do it for now! Try and work through as much of this as you can, and I will do my best to help out at the sprint, and I'm sure there will be a couple other people around who can also help out getting you on track. Come out, it'll be fun, and we definitely have a lot of work that needs doing!