I've been on the go so much that I haven't had the mental space to sit down and articulate a lot of the cool stuff that is going on. A few weeks ago I took part in a new open source conference, Writing Open Source (WOScon). The conference was born from conversations Emma Jane Hogbin and I had last fall, and she took the ideas and made it a reality in Owen Sound, Ontario. It was very small but packed with awesomeness, from people to ideas to food. There were quite a few exciting ideas for the Drupal community which will get written up and worked on down the road a bit. Lots of folks have written up summaries* of the event itself, but that single event has started something quite a bit bigger. The last day of the conference we transformed the conference website into a new community site and started a new Twitter/identi.ca hashtag for #wosdocs. We've started a new open source community to focus on documentation. That may not sound exciting to lots of people, but it is, even if you aren't a "writer" and here's why. read more »
A few weeks ago I posted a draft Drupal documentation roadmap on Drupal.org. In that post I attached the full roadmap of goals, but focused on the first two we are tackling: a new information architecture (IA) and recognition/reward for documentation contributors. We had a meeting in IRC shortly after and we discussed a number of questions and ideas. I've been on the road a lot since then, but things are still moving along and this post is to give a little nudge about what folks can do to get involved. We need folks to help with our survey, start up an interview process and give some advice on recording conversations. We are also in the process of scheduling our next meeting to talk about Drupal 7 documentation, so if you want to hop in on that, please fill out the Doodle to set a time.
When we posted the roadmap we also opened up a survey to gather feedback on recognizing contributors. The survey is about saying "thank you" to contributors. I'm going to close the survey this Thursday, July 2, so if you haven't filled it out yet, take a few minutes to do that this week. Once we close the survey, we'll need to analyze the results, start to sketch out things we might implement and look at what other surveys may be useful. If you are interested in helping with the analysis, please let me know. read more »
Too many times I have written a post, got it ready to go, set up my Twitter module to tell the world, and then right after I hit submit, I realize that I forgot to add the Twitter hashtags that will carry my tweet to glory. It occurred to me that maybe I should give myself a reminder by adding some hashtags to my Tweet by default, and the taxonomy terms I am using for the post are a pretty good bet for general usefulness. I whipped up a site-specific hack to do just that and thought others might be interested. It could probably be generalized so that it could be made a patch to Twitter module, but I'm not sure that is a great idea anyway and I don't have the time to even think it through, so have at. read more »
Just one month from today I'm going to get three days of hanging out with brilliant folks from a number of open source projects to talk shop, brainstorm and generally have a great time. I'm heading to the Writing Open Source conference up in Canada from June 12-14. In the true spirit of open source, we're coming together to help each other out. The conference is about collaboration, learning, and getting stuff done. We all have a lot to gain and I hope that anyone who can get there, makes the effort. There will be expert talks, unconference learning, a whole day of sprinting, and a lot of fun.
Sometimes in open source, of all places, there is a strong reluctance to share. I think the open source writing world is less like this generally than, say, code, but there are definitely lines to cross in writing as well. There are "published authors" who don't want to "just give it away for free," as well as the regular, tired line of not wanting to "help the competition." It's open source, people. I'm not going to go into the reasons I think that argument is silly, because it should be fairly obvious. I can understand "I have limited time and prioritize my efforts." I totally get that one. That's why it is cool to make time, like you get at a conference, where you can help both yours and other projects at the same time. read more »
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 »
While I was at Drupalcamp Galway, Stéphane (scor) recorded an interview with me about not just the Galway doc sprint, but also about future doc sprints around the world. He's got the interview up on his blog and it's only 6 minutes long. Give it a listen and let me know about your Drupal event and how I can help you out.
I managed to get my hands on a pre-release version of a new Drupal book that just came out this week. The book is Front End Drupal and it is written by Emma Jane Hogbin and Konstantin Kaefer. The book says on the cover, Designing, Theming, Scripting, and I'm excited to see another book that really gets into Drupal 6 theming. When we, at Lullabot, wrote Using Drupal and we had to draw the line at a basic intro to theming, I was looking for a book to carry that forward. Since I am lucky enough to have myself a copy and found some time to sit down and read it, I thought I'd share my thoughts for those that may be trying to decide whether to order it (short answer is "yes"). read more »
This past weekend I was in Ireland for DrupalCamp Galway. The organizers pulled off a great camp and they deserve a ton of kudos for getting things started, keeping things smooth, and pulling off a really fun event. Stephane Corlosquet (scor), Stella Power (stella), Heather James (heather), and Alan Burke (alanburke) did some really great things for this camp. Aside from a great venue with several rooms, at DERI, and a good lineup of great Drupal info, they also ran a site-building challenge to build websites for two charities in Ireland. They also provided space for an all-day documentation sprint. 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 »
In my post last week I mentioned that we had a professional cat herder, Cindy McCourt, for the Toronto Drupal documentation sprint and that the entire approach was a bit new and different for us. It was certainly different than anything I'd done before, especially in the Open Source or Drupal world. I should start by noting that all of this grew from community efforts by a number of people and isn't any kind of brainchild of mine. This sprint was an awesome showing of how Drupal contributors can do amazing things. read more »
