Announcement

The top priority in the Drupal documentation roadmap that was published earlier this summer was to reorganize the information architecture (IA) of the handbooks to make them easier to use and maintain. Becca Scollan volunteered to take the lead and she has been researching and building out a plan of attack. We are now at a good stage to start doing some work that the whole community can engage in.

We need to schedule our next regular two week check in meeting to see where we are with D7 docs and what needs to be done for the next two weeks. The meeting will be one hour in #drupal-docs on IRC. Please state your preferences in the Doodle is here: http://www.doodle.com/pshnatexsfigavfx

At the Drupal 7 docs IRC meeting on July 10, we decided to have bi-weekly meetings to keep D7 docs on track. We will meet in #drupal-docs on Freenode for one hour. The Doodle to voice your date/time preferences is at http://www.doodle.com/zd4rn6mkdmc7friw

One of the many pieces of feedback that Becca needs to help with redesigning our doc information architecture will be gathered through stakeholder interviews. Who are stakeholders? US! We need people who use (and maintain) the Drupal docs to help us with interviews, both as interviewers and interviewees. There is a sign up form to get involved.

Becca will provide more info on how it works, but basically we'll have a little script of questions to ask which you can use to chat in person or over Skype, etc. Record the interview (either in notes, audio or both) and then upload your results. It is a great way to get to know other community members while really helping to make our docs better. I have a bit more about this and some related things in a recent post on my blog (which went to the Planet a few days ago).

We need to start thinking out our plan for making sure that Drupal 7 has at least basic getting started documentation written when it is released. We'll meet for an hour in #drupal-docs on the Freenode network to talk about what we need to do and see if we can come up with some target dates.

Please fill out the Doodle by this Thursday, July 2, so we can set a time for the meeting.

For May, let's do a spring cleanup in the issue queue. We did this challenge in January and got a lot of work done. I've set up IRC meeting times to jam on the queue for Sundays and Thursdays at 5 p.m. GMT (10 am PDT, 1pm EDT, 7pm CET).

A few weeks ago I put up a quick survey about Drupal docs. It was very "by-the-seat-of-my-pants" but I just wanted to start getting a feel for where people are coming from and give the community an opportunity to talk about docs. It wasn't scientific and it wasn't even a "good" survey. I am definitely not a survey expert. Luckily some folks have volunteered to help me make future surveys better, but I'm still happy with what I learned from this one. I wanted to share some basic stuff that I found interesting from the responses.

As part of the overall Drupal documentation efforts and the Knight Foundation grant that was awarded this year, I will be conducting a number of short surveys about documentation over the coming year. The first survey, about participation is now up. It is only 5 questions long and should only take a few minutes to complete. The survey will close on Monday, April 13. The results will be posted back to the Documentation group once the survey closes.

There has been a small group of people looking at how to use Advanced help in Drupal 6 (and the new help system in Drupal 7) to add documentation about Drupal right into a site. Last week Adam Moore (redndahead) and a small team of sprinters worked on screenshot madness with the idea that we will eventually get this sorted out. I have had a proof of concept module sitting around for a while on my desktop and now that we really seem to be getting momentum, and I inexplicably woke up at 3:30 am this morning, I finally gave it a good look over, changed some stuff and committed a very, very barebones module to CVS. This should let people be able to play with the concept on their own sites to make it more real while we figure out exactly how we want to organize it, standards we need, etc. It also gives us something tangible to make patches for and use for testing out other advanced things we need to do, like syncing it with Drupal.org handbook pages. So, here are the important bits:

The March docs challenge is now up - better late than never! This month we are going to try to make things spiffy by applying the new, updated style guide to the handbook.

I'll be working on it myself and hanging out in IRC from 7-8 pm EDT (4 pm PDT) each Monday evening for the rest of March. I encourage everyone to dig in whenever they have time, even if it is only 15-30 minutes every so often and, if you are an IRC kinda person, please hang out in #drupal-docs to help answer questions.