I know that we have done the issue queue work as a challenge already, the very first one in January as a matter of fact. We got a lot accomplished in January, so let's do a spring cleanup. The reason I want to come back to the issue queue is two-fold. First, it still needs lots of love, as always, and second, I plan to finally post a beginning docs roadmap, and get some working groups kick-started around some of our big issues this month. We will be creating a lot of new issues in the docs issue queue, so I'd love for us to tidy up our work area before heading in to some ambitious new projects. read more »

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. read more »

I know I'm a bit late on the monthly challenge this time around, but between the Usability sprint and Drupalcon I've been a bit too hectic to get a post written up. So this will be a short month, but hopefully we can rock it anyway. This month the focus will be on spiffing up our handbook by reviewing what we have and applying the style guide to it. Much like how the coding standards make working with Drupal code a lot nicer (especially for newbies), having consistency and clarity in our handbooks will make it easier for people to understand the firehose of information on any given page. I found that the best way for me to learn Drupal coding standards was to review existing code and help fix it. This month's task should not only help us clean up the docs a bit, but also get more people familiar with the fact that we even have guidelines as well as tucking some things into the back of their minds for next time they write or edit. read more »

Thanks to a whole slew of people, we rocked the socks off of the January challenge and got the Documentation issue queue down to a svelte 125 issues. Keep in mind that includes all new issues that came in for the month too, so BIG thanks to everyone that helped out. Hopefully we can stay on top of things and continue to whittle it down through the year, so please don't stop. Can we end the year with a one-page (50 issues) queue? We can try. ;-)

With the rousing success of the first challenge, I now put before you yet another, for February. Let's keep that cleaning house feeling going and try to clean up as many comments from the handbook as we can. As of today, there are 689 pages that have comments on them. Let's knock that down to under 600 by the end of February. Comments on pages can add helpful information but it would be a lot more helpful if that information was in the page itself. We also get many support requests or comments with no real substance to them mixed in and lots of comments make everything more cluttered and harder to follow. To keep things tidy we need to review comments, then add the good info to the handbook, direct support questions to the proper place and delete distractions. There is a handy-dandy page on Drupal.org that explains how we approach incorporating comments for anyone that would like to get started. (Also remember that the instructions page itself is editable, so if something is not clear, feel free to make that page better.) This is a great group project for local user groups to do, even if it's just for 30 minutes. read more »

With the start of the new year, I've decided I'm going to run a monthly "Docs Challenge." I've got another post coming down the pike that lays out my long-term goals and the big pieces of the Drupal docs puzzle for this year. One of those goals is to find ways to make contributing to documentation clearer and easier. By setting up monthly challenges, I want to outline and give guidance on docs tasks throughout the year. It is one thing to tell people they can help and give them the tools, and quite another to actually explain what that means and guide them through the process. These challenges will hopefully not only get needed documentation tasks done, but show everyone exactly what it all means and that they really, really can help out. So, without further ado, my Docs Challenge for January is to clean up the docs issue queue on Drupal.org. We currently have about 200 issues covering 4 pages. I'd like to get that down to 150 (3 pages) by the end of the month. To that end, I'm going to set aside at least one hour each weekend day in January, from 1-2 p.m. EST (18:00-19:00 GMT) to work on the queue. I'll spend that hour on IRC in #drupal-docs on Freenode to answer questions and teach anyone who wants to learn as well. Fifty issues is a lot to get through and I'm going to need at least a little bit of help. read more »