Docs Team Update 4th December

There are a few things happening with the Docs team this week.

WordPress 3.5 Mid-Week Codex Sprint

After WordPress 3.5 launches we are planning a documentation sprint. This is inspired by Mozilla’s doc sprint. The sprint will take place:
Start: Thursday 6th December – 3pm UTC
End: Friday 7th December – 5pm UTC

I and other doc folks will be in the #wordpress-sfd chat room on IRC freenode. We’ve started a Codex updates list which myself and Drew will update after the Version 3.5 page is on the Codex.

If other teams would like to get involved, especially when it comes to updating pages relevant to their own area, that would be a great help.

If WordPress 3.5 gets pushed back by a few days we can push the sprint to next week.

You can read the announcement post here.

I’d love to see more documentation sprints in the future!

Handbooks

I’ve put out a call for people to help with putting together a style guide for the handbooks. We’ll also discuss formatting and come up with a list of tools that we’d like to use.

I also attended the Mobile dev chat last week and we had a chat about what they need from me, and the purpose of the handbooks. There’s a write-up on the mobile blog.

Help Tabs

During our weekly chat, we had a discussion about the Help Tabs. We’d like to work on these for the next release of WordPress (or the one after that). There were a few issues that came up that we feel need to be addressed:

  • how do people interact with the help tabs? (do some work with WordPress – users to see what they think of it?)
  • what is the state of our current content?
  • how can we make the content useful?
  • what experience do we want people to have?
  • what tone and voice will we use? (talk to marketing folks?)
  • how can we make help helpful?

Work will start in earnest on these after Christmas.

#docs