Project

Hello wonderful members of the Drupal Documentation Team!

Remember last fall, when we went through an amazing process of discussion and refinement for the Community Docs redesign? Putting aside what happened immediately afterwards (how long it took to get it actually deployed), do you remember how great it was when it was deployed finally? If not, take a look at a Community Documentation page, such as:
http://drupal.org/documentation/modules/dashboard

Hello Documentation Team!

As you probably have noticed, the Documentation Team is no longer taking full responsibility for maintaining/writing/editing the Community Documentation (recently renamed -- http://drupal.org/documentation). As part of the effort to move this responsibility out of the Documentation Team and into the Community at large, we are mostly trying not to use Documentation issues to report problems. Instead, we're encouraging people to edit the pages directly, or at least add a comment and change the page status.

You may have noticed that the big "Rename Documentation to Community Documentation" change happened recently -- if not, check out http://drupal.org/documentation and especially individual documentation pages such as http://drupal.org/requirements , to see the new layout.

Some of you may have heard that I wanted to organize an API docs cleanup sprint... Well, here it is:

(issue) http://drupal.org/node/1310084

The idea is to have a sprint over the next couple of weeks, and get the Drupal Core API documentation to conform better to our documentation standards. All the instructions are on the issue... please feel free to post general questions here, but otherwise, discussions about specific documentation, standards, etc. are better off on the issue queue.

Let's get this done!

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

Before diving into this post let me tl;dr: Fostering good communication with new users.

So I asked around on #drupal-contribute to see if there was a guide for helping and guiding users who want to help out with Drupal. There does not appear to be one so here is an attempt to make one. The goal of this discussion is to create an outline which will then get folded into the Drupal documentation for mentoring users. Lets play out a scenario to show where guidelines could help.

A user comes into the irc channel and states they want to help with a project and asks "Where should I start?"

I recently got the opportunity to work on an idea that I've had for a few weeks – some kind of automized technical documentation of Drupal sites. It resulted in a rudimentary but working module Documentation Robot, collecting some technical information about the site where it is installed and summarizing it on a page.

It currently collects information about node types (including CCK fields), installed modules/projects, and user roles. In the pipe is also support for documenting views, panels, better CCK field documentation, and a tonne of other ideas I got. I also want to make the collected information re-usable in a number of different formats (for example DITA or creation of book nodes), but that is further off in the future.

This summer, we are doing a project in which we learn Drupal/Open Source skills while helping gardening initiatives. Participants will build Drupal projects that foster "Garden Storytelling." Technically, we might create: recipes for Drupal sites, glue modules, and simple sites that act as web services. Our audience is primarily Drupallers & Community Gardeners. There are about 40 participants overall, half of whom are already involved with Drupal in some form.

An important part of what we will be learning will be documentation.

Per a conversation at the documentation BOF about how we are approaching managing documentation at CSU Monterey Bay, here's a screencast and additional information about our approach. Sorry it's been a week, but after the figurative "Drupal Fever" of last week I had a literal fever that laid me up for a while.