documentation

After a big discussion with some of the core devs who attended the PNW Drupal Summit last weekend, I've created a page for people who don't consider themselves part of the Docs Team to sign up as willing to mentor people working on Docs. http://drupal.org/node/936522

The idea is that people working on docs often need help with technical details of what they're documenting, and don't know who they can ask. The people I was talking to were more than willing to help out, and we also talked about pairing up docs people with contrib maintainers so they can help maintain project-specific docs.

Can anyone help out on D7 Theme docs? There is a big need for help there, and it's an area I am totally clueless about. 2 issues on my radar:

• http://drupal.org/node/755826 (re: core theme section of handbook)
• http://drupal.org/node/740194 (re: updating theme guide)

I think it needs a lot of love, so if anyone can adopt these and help out, that'd be fantastic!

An issue related to module documentation I have is that a number of the modules such as imce and notifications have lots of available settings without much explanation regarding when to use what setting (how to make it work for you). I was thinking that perhaps this issue could be addressed in some manner by our meetup group by having someone who knows a particularly highly used module well to walk the group through the process for setting it up, with some explanation for what the different settings mean, how to customize for particular situations. Perhaps some kind of ‘breakout’ group?

I'm so frustrated with trying to get information from PayPal and FNB. Can anyone please answer a few questions for me regarding PayPal as a payment means on a South African eCommerce site, geared toward servicing a South African market?

I'm about to tackle a modest project in the Accessibility pages and just wanted to be sure I wasn't reproducing anyone else's work. Anyone here working on those docs? (Our Accessibility group actually is coordinating a project to improve that content. I am plugged in with [the rest of] them.) If so, please touch base with me so we can collaborate.

Today at our meeting I offered to coordinate development and management of documentation of the “DropCRM” project. The following list is what I have worked out as being my key goals for documentation.

In order to make this CRM project “not suck” from the get go it is vital that business use cases to be evaluated and considered and that documentation is a living process in order to make sure that we get a tool that people can use.

This means creating 4 key types of documentation.

Been discussing with Craig from Amherst, Daniel from Sweden, and Kevin from Denver, ways that help requests or questions could be captured for purposes of creating better documentation. Here is one idea that is pretty simple actually. We would have to set up and agree to some rules.

The first rule. If anyone has a help request or question about some aspect of Open Media Project implementation, whether on IRC, GDO, ichat, etc., that question or request needs to be routed to one central location.

Neil (drumm) just responded on an old issue I'd filed, http://drupal.org/node/780982 - I've got enough occupying my brain that I don't think I'm the right person to be tracking stats, but I thought I'd post here in case anyone would be interested in trying to get access to Google Analytics, and occasionally checking in on stats to see if there's any useful info about oft-used handbook pages and such.

If you are interested, drop a note here and we'll see if we can get access to the analytics account.

I'm going to be working on a push for help with the D7 docs in the next little bit and thought it might be helpful to register a proper Docs Twitter account https://twitter.com/drupaldocs to announce sprints, ask for help with specific tasks, point out major discussions that happen, etc.

If anyone else wants the password so they can use the account, just send me a message or ping me on IRC and (as long as I know who you are) I'm happy to have multiple people use it.

I would be very grateful for some help here, and would also be happy to offer my help in improving the documentation, but I simply don't know where to start.

I'm trying my best to work my way through the Aegir installation, but after getting very annoyed with it yesterday because it simply wouldn't work, I eventually found that the instructions I was following for 0.3 have been broken for some time. That alone might well explain why a system with so much potential hasn't seen such widespread adoption?

To compound matters further though, the documentation for 0.4 appears to completely omit the instructions on where to download the correct files, and where to place them:

http://git.aegirproject.org/?p=provision.git;a=blob_plain;f=INSTALL.txt;...

I accept I might have failed to notice these instructions elsewhere but, given that a Google search tends to deliver people either to this wiki page - http://groups.drupal.org/aegir-hosting-system/documentation - or to the group homepage - http://groups.drupal.org/aegir-hosting-system - and that none of these pages set out in simple terms what to do, and how to do it, I'm amazed that more people are not asking for help on this.

What am I missing (apart from a brain, I mean!)?