Discussion

The Documentation Team has traditionally hosted a documentation sprint at all of the North American DrupalCons, and this past year, also at DrupalCon London (I'm not sure if there were sprints at earlier European DrupalCons or not). [If you're not familiar with the term "sprint", the DrupalCons usually have a day, either just before or just after the main DrupalCon event, where people get together and work in a big room, and we call that a "sprint".]

One thing I find conspicuously missing from drupal.org is API documentation for contributed projects. We've put a lot of effort into coding and documentation standards, and this is paying off in improving Drupal core. But we are not seeing any benefit of this in the contrib space. Contrib modules really have no incentive to provide extensive Doxygen documentation because no-one ever sees it.

I am relatively new to drupal, and i've been evaluating some Module-types like lightbox- or imagecropping- Modules.

There are quite some comparison pages, and even a list of them.
Very usefull.
But i think as static text, they will always be outdated.

So, did someone ever think about dynamic comparison tables for modules?
I'd imagine a view that can pull compatibility, installs, activity etc. directly from the projects, so they would never outdate...

Maybe that's harder than i think?

Unfortunately contrib documentation sometimes seems to be few and far between. I understand this is because people are busy and a lot of people are working on Drupal modules on their own time. That being said, I think if we had a template, it would be a lot easier for people who aren't used to writing documentation and who need guidance to write documentation, and it would also bring some consistency to the documentation that is on drupal.org.

Ia anyone interested in helping me create a template for contrib module documentation?

As a (partial) follow-up to Towards Docs Sustainability... Here is a proposal (or the beginnings of a proposal) for a major structural revision to how we do documentation on Drupal.org, and to the Documentation team.

Your suggestions and ideas are welcome! Please comment below, and then I'll go back and edit this proposal to incorporate the great suggestions I'm sure you will have.

Note: This is a work in progress, and may have been edited since you last looked at it, or since someone made a particular comment... sorry for any confusion!

If you are an experienced site builder, or a medium-to-experience PHP programmer, the Docs Team needs your help! We have several things that we’d like to get done that will improve the infrastructure for documentation and for contributing to documentation in the Drupal project.

EDIT: I'm marking tasks "taken" if someone has spoken up to do them.
Update Sept 23 - new tasks added!!
Update November 15 - task list edited

Site Builder Tasks

Compiling a bunch of the ideas that have come up over the last week in discussions with the Docs Team folks at Drupalcon London. It's been a running theme that the docs are no longer manageable, and some concrete suggestions to deal with that are as follows. Note they are all options and need not all be adopted, some are exclusive of others:

Hi all,

These days we see quiet many learning series / articles coming out on drupal.
All these are getting listed under drupal planet along with other articles as well.

Can we have a doccumentation page like we have for success stories, case studies where in we all list / aggregate feeds from all these learning series (another planet kind of page but, dedicatedly contains all the learning series / learning initiatives) ?
I am sure this will improve the ease of finding drupal related materials easily for a new comer.
Right now its hard to search these within planet.

This might be a wrong group to ask, but I will try anyway :)

Why can't we have a simple link to the contributed module's README on top of the module page, beside the "Version control" link ? And a similar "Documentation link".