Saturday - Drupalcon DC Ends With a Sprint!

Documentation sprint was a cool way to end Drupalcon DC. It felt good to spend a day trying to make some small improvement to Drupal. It wasn't without its frustrations though. Documentation can be hard! Didn't help that quite a bit of the handbook page heirarchy is broken (a drupal.org upgrade issue apparently).

I think documentation will be getting easier (and the docs pages better!) really soon though. With the kind of turnout we had for the documentation sprint on Saturday (over 75!), as well as the obvious focus of documentation leaders like Add1sun on fixing problems and paving the way forward, I hope improvements will start to accelerate.

For me, documentation sprint day was spent mostly doing the somewhat tedious but important task of "comment rolling". The idea is you find handbook pages with comments (especially if they have a lot), and you roll the useful information from the comments into the help topic, then identify the comment for deletion (we did this by listing URLs in an IRC room created for that purpose). Even with such a staightforward task, there were some surprising difficulties. The obvious one being that a number of times I came across pages where the heirarchy (parent page) was so obviously broken that sometimes it was difficult to know where the page was coming from. Some pages just had to be skipped. And what about pages where the main topic wasn't very good and the comments degenerated into a glorified form discussion? For now I left those alone.

While the less experienced worked on comment rolling, another group did the important task of finalizing a handbook page style guide, while yet another spent most of the day capturing screen shots for future handbook use.

I left motivated to get more involved in documentation.

Are you interested in getting involved with documentation? The Drupal Documentation group is a good place to look for announcements and upcoming doc sprints. You'll also definitely want to learn how to use IRC effectively. Oftimes the doc sprints are global affairs with many (or perhaps even most) participating via irc chat in #drupal-docs.