We’ve been kicking butt with the doc challenges so far this year. Lots of work is getting done to clean up our handbooks. I really want to thank everyone who is chipping in, even if only for five minutes. Every little bit that we do makes it just that much better for everyone. This month’s challenge will be an extension of a particular piece of March’s style guide challenge; marking pages with correct vocabulary terms. One of the goals for the future of the documentation in the Drupal.org redesign is to use vocabulary terms to help people find what they need, rather than the only way to find something being to know the magic path through the book structure. To that end, we need to actually tag the pages.
We have several vocabularies for handbook pages, some of them just recently added during Drupalcon DC, to help us slice and dice. We have the following vocabularies to sort things out: Audience type, Audience experience level, Drupal version and Page status. When the terms are applied to a page, it will add the term in the corner of the page. Clicking on those term links currently takes you to a pretty ugly unordered list of all the pages with that term. Not horribly useful right now, but those terms on going to be great once we start using them to produce views of content and as a tool to help search for the info you need. With this bright future before us, we’d like to get as many pages as we can tagged up. There is an explanation of the various vocabularies we are currently using on handbook pages in the Style guide’s structure page. All you need to do is browse through the documentation, see a page without tags, click the edit tab and add them.
You’ll also notice that one of the kinds of terms we are using is for the page status. This tells us if there is work that needs done for the page. If you’re looking for a break from tagging the pages, you can always check out the list of pages that need some love to find something to dig into. There is a list of links for the three main “needs work” tags on the Documentation maintenance tasks page, at the bottom, under “Review pages by status.” We hope to make this list more useful down the road as well, but even now it is a great help to know which pages need some attention out of all those many pages we have.
This month I will be bouncing around the world quite a bit, so making a regular time for me to be on IRC may be tough. I’ll try my best to be on IRC (Freenode #drupal-docs), working on page tagging for an hour each week on Wednesdays from noon to 1 p.m. EDT (16:00 GMT). If anyone would like to set up another regular time to meet with your fellow book hackers, let me know and I’ll make sure it gets announced.
RockTreeSky 