If it has been a while since you have seen the Joomla! Doc’s Wiki, you should take a look at all of the improvements made over the past few months. The Documentation Team has been hard at work organizing, adding features and cleaning out the clutter. We’ve even made it easier to contribute with the new wiki editor, including buttons to help insert code snippets into wiki pages.
What we need now is more involvement from the Joomla! Community. You don’t have to be a developer, on the Documentation Team or even a Joomla! expert, just five minutes a day or a half an hour on a Saturday morning can help improve the Joomla! Docs for everyone.
Some of the improvements are:
- Searching the Wiki - The Doc’s Wiki has integrated Google's Custom search for web sites. You can search the Docs Wiki as you would normally search; the difference is Google does all the work now. What does this mean? You will get search results more relevant and precise. As an added bonus, we even added a results tab at the top of the search results for the Joomla! Forum. If you can't find an answer in a wiki article, it might be found on the Joomla! Forum.
- Navigation - One thing a user will notice now is visual clues on a page. Some of them include tagging icons, title prefixes, such as J2.5 or J3.1, color schemes and page notices. These clues are used to at least let readers know the version of Joomla! an article refers too. Navigation is an area we are continuing to work on and improve.
- Archiving - We’ve also been busy archiving Joomla! 1.0 and 1.5 articles. A large part of improving navigation was cleaning out and cleaning up content.
- Landing pages - We are making and plan on making more useful landing pages and easy to find links for different versions of how to articles.
- Editing - We’ve made editing a wiki page simpler. All users should have as their default editor the new Wiki Editor. There are buttons to perform common tasks such as bolding text, creating lists and insert code snippets. There really are just a few wiki markup syntaxes to learn for creating a professional looking article and the new editor makes it even easier. As an added bonus the WikiEditor teaches the simple wiki markup while you’re editing.
- Watching articles - For logged in users, watching articles on the wiki is simple now too. Just click the ‘star’ icon at the top of a page to quickly add it to your watch list of articles.
- Tutorial page layouts - The installed extension called Headertabs makes longer pages easier to read. Here is an example of Headertabs in use, https://docs.joomla.org/J3.1:Installing_Joomla!.
Looking forward, there is still a lot of work to do on the Docs Wiki.
- Clean up continues - While there has been a noticeable reduction in incomplete, uncategorized, unlinked, redundant or out of date articles, the Docs Team still is working hard to find other articles of these types.
- Localisation - Many of our community members have expressed a desire for some time at Localising Joomla! Documentation. The Docs Team is getting closer to this realization and as soon as our “Clean Up” is complete, we can proceed with translations. The Docs Wiki will use a special extension to aide in tagging pages to translate, tracking translation percentages of a page and provide some automatic translations which can be improved with human interaction.
- Documentation projects - The Docs Team realizes the Joomla! Code Contributors and Extension Developers have done a lot of work writing and helping improve Joomla! Documentation in the past. We need your continued help! There has been a downward slide in participation, just take a look at our Docs Wiki Activity. The Docs Team needs your help and is trying to make it easier to contribute. With perpetual JDOC Projects you can share the work and at the same time keep our documentation organized. Here is our first project, JDOC Developer Tutorial Project of many more to come. These types of projects will also help with translation, just imagine seeing your contribution in multiple languages! The Docs Team will be adding more.
Documentation has a Docs Wiki Roadmap with short and long term goals, please post constructive suggestions and ideas on the Roadmap’s discussion page. Joomla! Community members can also participate in the Documentation discussions on the Joomla! Docs Mail List.
What? You want to get involved and find out how to help improve Joomla! Documentation? Read the article, How to Contribute to Joomla! Documentation. The Docs Team is looking forward to seeing your contributions!
Please discuss this blog here: https://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?f=704&t=806532
