Docs Team Intro

Hi there, I’m Siobhan McKeown, and I’m currently acting rep for the newly formed docs team. Docs was previously included in support but after documentation-related discussions at the summit it was decided that docs could do with its own group. Hopefully this will encourage more people to help to keep the codex updated, and should raise awareness that docs isn’t restricted to the codex, but anywhere that content or documentation is required, we can help out.

It’s a pretty new group at the moment, but this is what I’d love to see the docs group help out with:

  • updating the Codex
  • improvements to UI help and text
  • contributor handbooks
  • developer docs
  • any other content/doc-related tasks that other teams want to chuck at us.

To get involved with docs, you can jump in with editing the codex, or get involved with one of the projects that we are currently setting up.

These are:

1) Handbooks – a collection of contributor handbooks for guiding people through the process of contributing to WordPress. We currently have 35 volunteers for the handbooks. We’re a little light on contributors to the mobile and theme review manuals – if anyone knows of anyone who can help send them my way!

If you don’t feel that you’re enough of a WordPress expert to write content from scratch you can still get involved. We’re building a team of editors and proofreaders who will responsible for making everything consistent. It’s a great way to learn!

2) User Guide – this is nearly finished. A user guide (with lots of pilfered content from WordPress.com) that will help users to use WordPress. This will need to be updated any time that WordPress is updated. It also needs to find its final home.

3) Help tabs – this is currently in inception. Am hoping that it will be a review of content in the Help tabs with a view to making improvements alongside the UI improvements for genuinely helpful help.

Also ongoing is the Codex, which will need to be updated with the release of WordPress 3.5. There is a team of people who always work hard to get this done. This is usually done via the wp-docs mailing list, but with the new P2 we’ll hopefully see more activity there.

Whenever a new release appears I’ll post a list of things that need updated in the codex.

We are conducting some research into the types of documentation that different WordPress users/developers want to see. Once that is finished and the docs team has had time to digest it we can create a long-term roadmap for documentation.

In the meantime, if there are any docs you would like to see let us know here.