As a part of #2533684: Create 'Documentation' Section we are getting ready to migrate existing documentation into the new section.

During the migration:

  • the content type for documentation will be changed from 'book page' to 'documentation page' and 'documentation guide'
  • documentation will be split by major Drupal version (#2587331: Split documentation per Drupal version)
  • documentation will be reorganized into a new structure (#2744915: Define new structure for documentation)
  • book outline will be replaced with 'guides' system, where guide is a collection of documentation pages with own menu and maintainer(s), who have additional permissions to take care of the content inside of the guide

We will start by migrating 'generic' documentation, such as Understanding Drupal, Structure guide, etc. Documentation for contributed projects will follow in a couple of weeks.

Progress:

  • Understanding Drupal
  • Installation Guide
  • Administration & Security Guide: in progress
  • Structure Guide
  • Multilingual Guide
  • Site Building Guide
  • Mobile Guide
  • Theming Guide
  • Develop for Drupal

How to help

If you'd like to help during and after migration, sign up to maintain specific part of the documentation over at #2682083: Recruiting guide maintainers for documentation

Information for contributed project maintainers

If documentation for your project exists somewhere in Site Building Guide or any other documentation book, we will create a new documentation guide, and migrate existing docs into it. If you are project maintainer, you will be added as a guide maintainer, so that you could modify guide, its menu, its contents, add other guide maintainers, etc.

Please be prepared to spend a bit of time in the next few weeks modifying your documentation post-migration. If there is specific time before/after which you want us to migrate documentation for your project, please let us know in the comments.

NOTE: Existing order of pages set via Book outline will be lost during migration. You will have to rearrange menu of your new documentation guide to set desired order of the pages.

The hierarchy of the pages inside of the guide is flat, which means there are no 'child' pages, all of them are on the same level inside of the guide. We strongly encourage you to merge pages together, and have less but longer pages in your guide.

Comments

tvn created an issue. See original summary.

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tvn CreditAttribution: tvn at Drupal Association commented
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tvn CreditAttribution: tvn at Drupal Association commented
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tvn CreditAttribution: tvn at Drupal Association commented
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tvn CreditAttribution: tvn at Drupal Association commented
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tvn CreditAttribution: tvn at Drupal Association commented
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saurabh.dhariwal CreditAttribution: saurabh.dhariwal at AddWeb Solution Pvt. Ltd. commented
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gisle’s picture

gisle CreditAttribution: gisle at Hannemyr Nye Medier AS commented

The old user contributed documentation was a Wiki and it was very simple to correct or add missing documentation.

I've looked at the new documentation pages that are being rolled out, and it looks like this is no longer the case. Instead, each page is assigned a "maintainer" and there is a button to "discuss".

If this how you plan things to stay, I fear that this will not be sustainable. Some pages are bound to become abandoned as maintainers lose interest or just move on.

When this happens to projects, there is both a temporary fix (patches posted to the project's issue queue), and a procedure for repairing the situation.

If the user contributed documentation is no longer going to be a Wiki, how are you going to deal with abandoned documentation pages?

gisle’s picture

gisle CreditAttribution: gisle at Hannemyr Nye Medier AS commented

As a part of #2533684: Create 'Documentation' Section we are getting ready to migrate existing documentation into the new section.

It also looks like you're removing the old user created documentation pages.

There is two problems with this approach:

  1. The documentation pages was very much interlinked. As you remove pages, these links go stale.
  2. The Wiki pages was copyedited by a multiple of individual users over time, and information was added to have specific information in place to cater for the needs for miscellaneouscommunity activities (e.g. Project Applications and LWG to name just two such activities I know about). The individual maintainers that now is in charge of the new pages cannot possibly know about all these activities and what they require from the documentation, and will probably delete a lot of important information in the process because they do not understand its relevance or significance.

By all means - create all the new pages you want to create, but please stop removing the old pages until you understand what they're used for and from where they are linked to.

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tvn CreditAttribution: tvn at Drupal Association commented

re: #8 - documentation will stay a 'wiki', as in pages will be editable by any user as they are now. Permissions are restricted at this moment while we migrate initial pages and test that migration script and the new content types work the way we want them to. Permissions to be edit will be opened up shortly, definitely before we migrate bigger documentation books.

Each page is not assigned a maintainer, only 'guides' - collection of pages on specific topic - are. Issue linked at the top of the issue summary and various child/related issues provide more information about the functionality we are moving towards and why.

Re: #9 - we are not removing pages. Migration script changes the content type of the node, but the author/history of revisions/comments/url are all preserved. That said during the audit of documentation pages we did identify *obviously* outdate pages, empty pages, etc. which will not be migrated into the new system. Those pages will be kept as book pages until the migration is finished and people had a chance to highlight if something relevant is missing and should indeed be migrated.

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tvn CreditAttribution: tvn at Drupal Association commented
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Status update: we kicked off migration with docs about Drupal.org, to test out migration script and fix any potential bugs before we start migrating documentation about Drupal. Found a few minor things and fixed them. I should start migrating 'Understanding Drupal' guide soon-ish.

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tvn CreditAttribution: tvn at Drupal Association commented
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Understanding Drupal book now done. Content from it went into the two new guides:
https://www.drupal.org/docs/7/understanding-drupal
https://www.drupal.org/docs/7/choosing-drupal-version

D8 versions of those need to be created #2774809: Write documentation for Drupal 8

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joachim CreditAttribution: joachim commented

Is there an issue for migrating the contrib modules documentation?

I am very concerned about the migration discarding book hierarchy data. There are many modules where this is a vital part of the content, and losing it will mean a lot of manual work to restore it. Eg Feeds https://www.drupal.org/node/622696, and Flag https://www.drupal.org/documentation/modules/flag, to pick just two modules at random.

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tvn CreditAttribution: tvn at Drupal Association commented

There is not a separate issue for contrib, this one covers all migration. We are not migrating contrib docs yet.

Regarding the hierarchy, flat hierarchy does not mean that all of the pages about a module will be in a single guide. We will create sub-guides to preserve hierarchy whenever makes sense. E.g. in the Feeds example there can be an overall Feeds documentation guide, with sub-guides: The site builder's guide to Feeds, The developer's guide to Feeds, Contributed plugin modules for Feeds.

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tvn CreditAttribution: tvn at Drupal Association commented
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Updating status. Installation guide is done. Admin and security guide is in progress.

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andypost CreditAttribution: andypost as a volunteer and at Skilld commented

Having so big fonts require to make width to be wider

It's really hard to read https://www.drupal.org/docs/8/modules/features

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joachim CreditAttribution: joachim commented

> Regarding the hierarchy, flat hierarchy does not mean that all of the pages about a module will be in a single guide. We will create sub-guides to preserve hierarchy whenever makes sense. E.g. in the Feeds example there can be an overall Feeds documentation guide, with sub-guides: The site builder's guide to Feeds, The developer's guide to Feeds, Contributed plugin modules for Feeds.

Have you had a look at the Flag documentation? That nests quite deep. I'm really not happy about the prospect of that structure being lost.

Is there an issue where the contrib module docs migration is being worked out?