JDOC:Community well/November 2014

Report date Sun, 23 Nov 2014

This is the first installment of - Past, present and future activities of Joomla Documentation!

Looking back

• Documentation has made some great improvements for Joomla migration and updating documentation.
  • Working with the Update Working Group, several new documents on Joomla Migration can be found on the Portal page for Upgrading Versions. Thanks Jenn Gress, Connie Lippert and too many others to mention who contributed to the docs as they were in development.
  • Roughly two-thirds of all older updating and migration documentation has been improved or archived
• Translations, much thanks to MATsxm for taking on the translation administration of JDOCs. This includes tagging and approving articles so our JDOC:Documentation Translators can translate. There are about 140 translated pages currently. Sign up, wait for your approval, welcome package, and then have some fun!
• JDocs cleaned out some unused and spam user accounts a few weeks ago. 75,000+ of these types of accounts. Our real numbers of contributors are about 2650 with only 37 recently active users. Let's change that, see Looking forward below for an upcoming JDOC milestone.
• Our JDOC Contributor Policy has been updated to be more inline with that of the Joomla Forum
• Community reporting! If you haven't guessed it yet, you're reading it right now.

The right now

• JDOC cleanup, JDOC cleanup, JDOC cleanup. Yes, this is a continuing endeavor with no end. It takes a village of willing villagers to help maintain our project's documentation. Be a good villager!
• Final preparations for the Migration Marketing Plan of the Update Working Group. Joomla 2.5 is nearing End of Life, try starting with Why Migrate and work your way through them. Developers, please check out Migrating a Template from Joomla 1.5 to 3.x and give your feedback. Better yet, we could use your help with the links at the bottom of the page. They need to be checked for accuracy. All hands, ahh... eyes on deck!
• New pages for the upcoming Joomla 3.4 release. Review these two pages, Using Composer with Joomla and Installing Weblinks.

Looking forward

• Joomla Docs is turning 7 years old next month! It's birthday is December the 29th. Help us celebrate this with giving JDOCs the gift of your time.
• There needs to be a serious discussion about Help pages. Help pages have grown in volume(the actual number of them) and complexity since the Joomla 1.5 help system was implemented. There are two options available.
  • Docs is in need of system testing volunteers to get these two PRs working for automation of Help pages screenshots, see http://issues.joomla.org/tracker/joomla-cms/5007. The PRs mentioned in this issue automate screenshots and some of the text. To use them, they need to be checked and then updated to work with current testing.
  • Alternative idea, making the help screens task specific with an example of how to preform a specific task related to the administrative view. This would be similar to how WordPress formats their help system.
• The Docs Working Group is putting together a team tasked with creating a Joomla flavoured en-GB style guide for our coders as well as our documentation contributors. Realistically, this style guide will be two separate documents but the goal is to make sure they are in sync with each other. e.g. W2W (Words to Watch). If you are interested and are a native en-GB speaker, please contact Hils Cheyne (@HilsCheyne) or Brian Teeman (@brianteeman) on Twitter and let one of them know you are willing to help. You can find the existing document with updated formatting published on Google Docs. Some of the first steps will involve breaking up the document into sections stored on GitHub. This will allow the team to branch off different parts not relevant to each guide.
• Software updates to documentation coming soon.
• Sharing has been in place on JDOCs for months now, following us coming soon.