A DITA documentation distribution for Drupal
Introduction
A couple of weeks ago we launched Modulecraft an awareness & fund-raising project that aims to rally Drupal professionals around a shared effort to create the ultimate toolset for Drupal business. The first fundraising round has as goal the development of a documentation distribution for Drupal that uses a similar approach as the localization server and that enables a distributed/federated documentation architecture for the Drupal project. As a Drupal user you'll be able to get a set of documentation from the drupal.org docs server imported into your own site. You will than be able to edit it and build subsets of the documentation for your own projects. You'll also be able to submit topics that were edited or created by you on your own infrastructure and add them as suggestions to the Drupal documentation server.
The following is a first proposal for the specification of the Documentation system we want to build as part of the modulecraft project. It is by no means complete, and it strongly needs your feedback. This is our first encounter with DITA and our ideas should really be proof checked by technical writers that have extensive experience using DITA. It also contains some proposes a somewhat exotic usage of RDFa, feedback is also very much needed here. In the coming days I'll be adding new sections to the specification here. This is a wiki so be bold! You can add comments either here or at the original posts on the Pronovix blog. I'll be incorporating feedback into this wiki.
Read moreContent Sharing and Distribution
This feature should provide users several ways to share and distribute content, including -
- Voting, tagging, and commenting via the web and cell phones/SMS-Text
- Automatically post for Podcasting and On-Demand via the web
- Live Streaming via the web
- Create an unlimited number of audio or video podcasts
- Update users about new content via RSS or Email
- Embeddable files easily posted to myspace, facebook, blogs, etc
- Searchable content library with 24/7 access to archived content
- Ability to share and retrieve content from other external sources
Fundraising tools
Description/Requirements
A page dedicated to listing individuals, organizations or companies who have sponsored some part of the Dojo or Dojo lessons.
Elements
- corporate sponsors
- link to detail page with logo, company description, and members
- individual sponsors
- link to detail page with badge and description
Resources
- d.o. issue - http://drupal.org/node/552144
Custom user profiles and membership features
Description/Requirements
At this time we will be looking for only minimal account features.
Elements
Account information
This should be the only required info upon sign-up
- username
- E-mail address
- password
Profile
- Real Name
- Drupal user name
- IRC user name
- Title
- Company or organization
- Interests/skills
- Location
- City
- State
- Zip or postal code
- Website url: Your professional web page, blog, etc.
- Short biography: A short history or background about yourself (25 words max).
Workshop: Infrastructure
Topics covered
Infrastructure (Nuts and bolts of code, servers, databases, etc.)
- Build environment and version control environment.
- Scaling Drupal, performance and scalability (server/database optimization and distribution)
- Virtual servers and virtual services ec2, s3
Development Workflow (Getting from code to production)
- Development environment (including USE of version control and build env.)
- Quality Assurance (following/implementing process, procedures, standards)
- Testing (unit testing, black and white box testing itself).
Workshop: Design and theming
[Note: This workshop is a component of this Drupal Kata Master Class.]
Objective: Create a new design and theme for the Drupal Dojo and Drupal Kata websites.
Topics covered
Graphic design
- Designing for Drupal (Structure of a Drupal site, visualizing your design in Drupal…)
- Drupal-friendly CSS tricks (form elements, menus, etc)
- Making a Drupal site not look like one – new ways of theming common UI elements
Theming
- Converting mock-ups to Drupal themes
- Theming Panels
- Theming Views
Workshop: Project planning
[Note: This workshop is a component of this Drupal Kata Master Class.]
Preliminary discussions to establish website features to be included on the site. Website features have previously been defined (http://drupal.org/node/201891). We will reevaluate as well as open up discussion to what others may be beneficial. These discussions will help us finalize the architecture for the website and give us better direction as we move forward with development and design.
Topics to cover
- Requirement Gathering
Workshop: Testing and site deployment
[Note: This workshop is a component of this Drupal Kata Master Class.]
Topics to cover
- Testing
- Launch
- Site Optimization (SEO)
- Bug Fixes
Session submission and workflow
Objective: Create an easy way for users to propose lessons and sessions; a way for people to vote/approve sessions; a way for teachers to claim sessions (if they didn't propose them); a way to compile related materials and resources.
Description/Requirements
Read moreRepository for learning materials
Objective: Create a centralized repository for all Drupal learning materials (video, audio, slideshows, documentation). This would include both Dojo branded content as well as materials aggregated from other sources. Provide an easy way to filter/recommend content.
Description/Requirements
- A way to tag site content as well as a way to mark off-site resources and create various listings. Basically an internal/external resources library. A way for someone looking for xyz info to get a list of all resources for it that have been tagged as such by the Dojo community.
