Project

How did you first get involved with contributing to the Drupal project? If you're like me, it was at a DrupalCon contribution day, where a wonderful mentor guided me through the pitfalls of joining in to our global project. But not everyone has the chance to attend a DrupalCon or other event with mentors, so many people instead try to navigate through the "Getting Involved Guide" on drupal.org to figure out how they can contribute.

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

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.

If you've been following discussions here for a while, you're hopefully aware that for the past year, we've been working on creating a User Guide for Drupal 8, and it is coming along very well. I'd like to thank recent volunteers Anna van Raaphorst, Antje Lorch, Boris Doesborg, Charles Leverington, Grant Dunham, Jojy Alphonso, Michael Lenahan, Zach Carter, and attendees of a Spokane workshop for their help in testing the guide, updating content for accuracy, and copy editing!

As I'm sure most of you know, Drupal 8.0.0 was released a few weeks ago (and 8.0.1 has already followed). There was much rejoicing, after several years of development!

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