At the first DocCamp the idea came up that it would be nice to have all Help Screens for 1.5 created, accessible by the Help buttons at the Back-end of your Joomla! site. Four months later, I'm happy to announce that all Help Screens are done, and everyone is able to access all Help Screens at there Joomla! Back-end. The story of an enormous project, with lots of teamwork, discussing, learning and last but not least.. fun!

Google Highly Open Participation contest

It all started with GHOP. During the contest we chatted a lot with each other at the IRC channel. We knew that we did not want to just 'stop' after GHOP. These chats should be continued! Yes, they did, at the Skype Group Chat.

Some GHOPers also joined the Doc Camp, starting at the 19th of January. I did as well (of course), having fun while creating documentation. I choosed to do both Developer Documentation and User Documentation. There my interest began to grow for creating User Documentation, especially the Help Screens.

I noticed a few weeks later, after GHOP was finished, that there had not be any progress anymore on the Help Screens page. Asked Chris Davenport whether I was allowed to go on working them, and of course I could continue.

Help Screens Project

Because there were lots of them to be created, I started to contact some GHOPers, whether they would like to help me. A new project was born! We thought it would be useful to organise a (digital) meeting, to discuss about who will do what, and what would be a useful layout of a Help Screen. Thinking of the idea was much easier than getting it planned. Timezones are really challenging!

After the meeting, we started to work on the Help Screens. There were actually three 'parts' that needed to be completed per Help Screen: Creating (at the Docs), reviewing and moving them to help.joomla.org, so they will be accessible by Joomla!'s Back-end.

It went quite well, but very slow! There are more than 60 Help Screens, and we were working on them with (only) the three of us. Luckily, Mark joined us when we were about halfway. He just came in, without an 'announcement', and we were all suprised. Still remember the PM 'Who is Mark Dexter?' from Max, our reviewer.

Making progress..

With the help of Mark (still wondering how come Mark has that much time), things went faster and faster. A few changes at the SVN had been made to split up some Help Screens, combine them, and to create a few that were missing.

And now.. everything is done! At the end, after four months. How great!

Contributors

I would like to thank everyone who joined the Help Screens Project!

• Chad Windnagle (drmmr763) for his great ideas and creating some Help Screens
• Max Shinn (trombonechamp) for reviewing nearly all Help Screens
• Mark Dexter (dextercowley) for creating Help Screens and moving them to help.joomla.org
• Chris Davenport (Documentation Working Group Coordinator) for his assistence where needed and for creating a White Paper about the Help Screens
• Amy Stephen (AmyStephen) for ideas, communication and just being there
• CirTap for his enormous MediaWiki knowledge
• Ian MacLennan (ianmac) for fixing keyreferences at the SVN

Without you this project could not have been completed, thanks a lot!

Marieke van der Tuin
Project leader 1.5 Help Screens Project