We had a productive HelpHub meeting yesterday where we made a solid start to the content planning side of things (Slack logs). Development has also been moving swiftly along with some great progress being made on a daily basis.
Staging site
I use the term ‘staging’ somewhat loosely here, but I have setup a site that we are going to use to showcase HelpHub as well as store all the content before it is ultimately moved over to its new home on the WordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ network. You can find that site on wp-helphub.com – it is blocked to logged-out users purely so that any content we add doesn’t start to get indexed by Google, but I’m happy to open it up if that isn’t actually a realistic concern.
Development
Development of HelpHub continues to be managed through the GitHub repo – things are going well with a few features already merged into the master branch. All of the code that has been merged is live on the staging site already and I will be keeping that up to date as we go along. If you have any input on the development then please comment on the relevant issue on the repo.
Content
We’ve started the process of adding content to the site. This will obviously be an ongoing task even after HelpHub goes live, but we’ve put the initial building blocks in place and have started planning for this:
Migrating from the Codex
We took the list of the top 500 codex pages (based on page views) and identified all of the articles that will be relevant to HelpHub (i.e. all of the user documentation) – this has given us 142 articles that will be our initial primary focus for migration Moving the code, database and media files for a website site from one server to another. Most typically done when changing hosting companies. from the codex. Those articles are listed in this sheet and we will continue to expand that sheet as needed, but the top 500 pages are the most logical place to start. This migration will most likely have to be a manual process, but I am looking into possible ways to automate it.
Categorising content
Having content is great, but it needs to be categorised well in order to be effective. To that end, we had a healthy discussion on GitHub regarding the categories that we will need to use – any input there would be greatly appreciated. It’s also helpful to bear in mind that the categorisation can (and should) be iterative – we can add/remove/edit categories as and when we need to do so.
If you have any feedback or input on the HelpHub project then please comment on here or jump into the #docs channel on Slack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/.. We have weekly meetings at 14:00 UTC on Tuesdays.
#helphub, #status
