User Guide

As you probably know, we're working on creating a User Guide for Drupal 8. We started working on the actual content about two weeks ago, and several topics are in progress. We started writing before we were really sure what the guide should contain, working on a short list of topics we were pretty sure we'd want to include.

Wow! Thanks to everyone who commented on our proposal to create a Drupal 8 user guide. We read all of the comments carefully, and have made a plan for how to get this manual written, edited, and tested:

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