Discussion

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!

It's been way too long since we've written one of these, and a lot has happened in the last year. Yeah, that's right, it has been a year since the last "This Month in Drupal Documentation"! I can't even being to summarize the whole year in a single post, so here are some highlights of what is going on right now.

We've been working on a User Guide for Drupal 8 for about a year now, and the English version is in pretty good shape -- it's in the stage now of copy editing and image refinement, and we're working on making a home for it under drupal.org/documentation. (If you are interested in helping with copy editing, see https://groups.drupal.org/node/512211 by the way -- there is still time to help!) So, it's about time to think about translating the guide to some (and hopefully, eventually all) of the 100+ languages that Drupal supports.

I was looking at the Sprints page for DrupalCon New Orleans and noticed that on the accompanying sign-up spreadsheet, there is not yet a Documentation sprint listed. (Sprints are times at DrupalCon where people get together to work on projects.) I can't complain about this too much, since I will not be at DrupalCon and will also not be available remotely to help out...

We've been working on creating a User Guide -- the project page is here:
https://www.drupal.org/project/user_guide

One of the things we decided early on is that it should have an index. So, as the topics were written (by a variety of people), each one was given one or more index entries. This has resulted in an index that is sort of OK, but has some problems, because it was created by many people instead of a single professional indexer. You can currently see the index (as it is now) at:
https://userguide_new-drupal.dev.devdrupal.org/d8guide/en/_index.html

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

Here's an update from the Documentation Working Group (DocWG) on what has been happening in Drupal Documentation in the last month or so. Sorry... because this is posted in the Core group as well as Documentation, comments are disabled.

If you have comments or suggestions, please see the DocWG home page for how to contact us. Thanks!