Announcement

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.

I've made a few posts here in the Documentation group on groups.drupal.org over the past few years about the Help Topics experimental module. Today, I have a very brief update on the project, and a call for help in editing/reviewing the topics for the new Help Topics system!

We haven't written much about the User Guide here lately, so I wanted to post a quick update:

a) The User Guide has recently been updated, with new screenshots and a few text changes, for Drupal 8.4.0. You can view the User Guide on Drupal.org (English, with links to translations) at:
https://www.drupal.org/docs/user_guide/en/index.html
For PDFs, e-books, and other information, always check the User Guide project home page:
https://www.drupal.org/project/user_guide

Neil Drumm (drumm) and I have been working lately on the API module (used to build API documnentation sites like https://api.drupal.org and others). We've made a 7.x-2.x branch of the project, which works quite differently from the 7.x-1.x branch. The major changes are that it uses a different (and external) parsing library for parsing PHP files, and it uses Composer to manage its external library dependencies.

Several of the active Drupal translation groups have noticed that we now have a User Guide on Drupal.org... Today, I'd like to formally announce that the User Guide is open for translation!

I am very pleased to announce that the English version of the User Guide is live on drupal.org, at last! You can see it at
https://www.drupal.org/docs/user_guide/en/index.html

You will also see links on the User Guide pages to Catalan and Hungarian (Magyar) versions of the User Guide. These are in-progress translations, with most images in the target language. Currently, most of the text is still in English, but more complete translations will be coming soon, since these two language teams are hard at work translating.

At long last, the copy editing of the User Guide is done! (If you've been a member of this group for a while, you should know what I'm talking about; if not, go browse the archives at https://groups.drupal.org/documentation for the last 1.5 years or so). I'd like to thank everyone who helped with editing tasks, and especially Jojy Alphonso (jojyja), who did the vast majority of the copy editing. THANK YOU!

I'm pleased to announce that the User Guide has an all-but-complete first draft! (There are 3 topics that haven't been written, but they are all just about done.) So, it's time for the next phase: copy editing and testing. There were many people who, when we originally announced the User Guide project, said they were interested in helping during the editing phase -- now is your chance!

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!

It's been a busy month in Drupal documentation land. 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!