by José San Martin // 2008-08-14 - 02:17
I've never blogged about Drupal Docs.
It's a project to get a new home to Drupal documentation and expand its power. The most important things here are:
- Get a nice place for documentation and make it easier for people to find what they want.
- Have a more organized distinction of different types of documentation content - handbooks, tutorials, tips and videocasts. If we have more space, why not get things organized? It will allow more concise handbooks and many many more tutorials and tips. Not to mention the videocast library, of course!
- Enable translation. As a non native English speaker I know how this matter for people who doesn't speak English. After all, Drupal is for everybody and ment to empower people all over the world.
This project does not involve writing or rewriting documentation, or restructuring handbooks. I'm not part of Drupal documentation team and the content is not my concern at all. The documentation team does an amazingly well-done job and Drupal Docs is only a bigger nicer home for them.
I'm developing a prototype at http://dev.chuva-inc.com/projetos/docs/ and everyone is welcome to see and give their opinion.
Most exciting things already implemented in this prototype:
- Translation translation translation!
- Different content types: handbooks, tips, tutorials, videocasts
- Videocasts! And... subtitled videocasts!! Pretty neat, huh? Hat tip: Will White
Let's chat about it in Szeged?
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The problem with the Drupal
The problem with the Drupal documentation is that it is not at all organized according to what the *user* is trying to achieve, it is organized by how the *developer* thinks about his or her creation. Therefore, related tasks are not properly bundled and structured. It's a common problem, especially with open source documentation.
Thanks
Hey guys,
Thanks for putting time and energy into helping out the docs. The conversation that we had in the Drupal.org redesign thread was definitely a great start to addressing some of the main docs "pain points."
We will definitely have new tools available to us in the redesign so looking at what tools work well is a great exercise that we do need to play with. Playing with better ways to use taxonomy and potential content types is key to helping us organize the torrent of info we have. And the main issue that everyone really has with the docs is finding what you need.
I agree that translations are an ultimate goal. D6 core has great tools to help that but I don't think it is as easy as setting up i18n on the site. Beyond the technical implementation, we need to figure out the human factor of *managing* translations. Keeping translations in sync and at least somewhat thorough (for the basic, core docs) is no small task. This goal is going to require a lot of brainstorming to come up with a solution that is manageable in the long-term for a group with limited human resources. That said, I am planning to gather both docs and i18n folks together to have an initial shot at brainstorming this in Szeged, during the sprint. So PLEEEEASE, definitely, let's meet up in Szeged and talk docs. :-)
Long live Drupal
Long live Drupal
Videocasts
I've thought a lot about the videocast section, and have started to pull together all of the drupal videos I could find onto my site:
http://zivtech.com/videos/drupal-video-planet
The translation thing is tough. I have no idea what language half of the videos are in, let alone what they are about- so any attempt to organize the videos into a more logical display would require someone who spoke each language being used there.
BTW- I think that captioning tool you pointed to will be supported by emfield soon...
add1sun: I would love to
add1sun: I would love to discuss that matter on Szeged. I'll be there. Translation is no easy task. We will have to build reliable teams for each language before starting translating docs, of course. But I really hope that there's interested and available people for at least a couple of languages out there - there are vibrant spanish-, french-, dutch- and hungarian-speaking communities that I expect to have good documentation.
Lara
The problem with the Drupal documentation is that it is not at all organized according to what the *user* is trying to achieve, it is organized by how the *developer* thinks about his or her creation. Therefore, related tasks are not properly bundled and structured. It's a common problem, especially with open source documentation.
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