Tag Archives: recap

Hugh Lashbrooke 11:06 am on November 26, 2015
Tags: , recap   

HelpHub Meeting Recap, Nov. 25: Wireframes Finalised

Thanks to everyone who chipped in during yesterday’s HelpHub meeting. It was the last one that we will have this year and I’m excited that we have made the progress that we have so far! You can read the full SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. logs here.

Wireframes

The main purpose of this week’s meeting was to nail down the final wireframes that we are going to be using. We went through the feedback thoroughly and, based on our own ideas as well as the feedback we received, we have finalised these wireframes as the ones that we will be running with. A huge thanks to everyone who contributed their thoughts and ideas to this process especially @saracope and @greensteph for their hard work on the wireframes themselves.

We will also be adding wireframes for mobile views before we begin development as we will be keeping responsiveness as a priority for v1 of this project.

Design

After finalising the wireframes we decided that it would be a wholly unnecessary step to create full design mockups for HelpHub, largely because we already have the layout finalised and the actual styling will be based on the rest of WordPress.orgWordPress.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/, which leaves very little need for actual designs to be put together.

Development

So the next phase of the project is development. We have a number of volunteers who will be chipping in to help with this for both the front-end and back-end side of things. When the new year starts we will kick off with a discussion regarding the data structure (required custom post types, etc.), which will then inform the architectural decisions for the project. At the same time we will discuss the theming side of things and settle on the way forward for building the front-end of the site. I will look into our options here regarding the use of GitHubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/ and any other related tools that would prove useful, but either way – development of this project will be done in an open and inclusive manner.

 

So with that, I’ll leave you all and will report back next year when we kick off with the development phase of this exciting project!

#helphub, #recap

Hugh Lashbrooke 12:29 pm on November 19, 2015
Tags: feedback-needed, , recap   

Feedback needed on HelpHub wireframes

Hey everyone,

At yesterday’s HelpHub meeting we nailed down the final wireframes for the front page and the single articles. The other pages (search results & archives) will come later and will be largely informed by wireframes of the pages that we already have, so I’m not too worried about them.

What we need now is feedback from the broader community, which is where you come in 🙂

You will find the wireframes up on Balsamiq where you can view and comment on them without having to login. To give a bit more context for what you see there, we have three options for the front page:

  • Home page 1
    • Focussed search box and categoryCategory The 'category' taxonomy lets you group posts / content together that share a common bond. Categories are pre-defined and broad ranging. boxes
  • Home page 2
    • Focussed search box, less category boxes and boxes for user skill level with a curated list of links (dubbed ‘learning paths’)
  • Home page 3
    • Focussed search box, tabbed box for learning paths and a few category boxes

Then, alongside that, we have two options for the single article pages:

  • Single article 1
    • Clean layout with focus completely on the article and related links pushed to the bottom
  • Single article 2
    • Related links in the sidebarSidebar A sidebar in WordPress is referred to a widget-ready area used by WordPress themes to display information that is not a part of the main content. It is not always a vertical column on the side. It can be a horizontal rectangle below or above the content area, footer, header, or any where in the theme. for quicker access

Don’t worry about the design at all – these are just wireframes, so we’re looking at the layout here and not the design.

What we need from you

So with all that info in mind, what we’re looking for at this point is feedback on which wireframes you think are more effective at delivering a great site for user documentation. You can leave comments on this post or directly on the wireframes, but either way – it would be awesome if we could have some feedback of what you all think of them and if you think we’re hitting the right mark.

Huge props to @saracope, @greensteph and @versatility for their hard work on these wireframes!

#feedback-needed, #helphub, #recap

Hugh Lashbrooke 1:45 pm on October 7, 2015
Tags: , recap   

HelpHub Meeting Recap, Oct. 6

In yesterday’s HelpHub meeting we spoke mostly about user personas as a starting point for our content structure and design. You can read the full Slack logs here.

My apologies for having to leave the meeting early – an emergency came up on my side, but thanks to @samuelsidler for stepping in to help guide the discussion to the end.

After much discussion (and some initial confusion) we nailed down the user personas we’ll be focussing on. The user personas are effectively the identities of the people who will be using HelpHub. We put our outline together in this Google Doc, but this is what we settled on:

  1. Publishers
    • People who work within a WordPress Installation
    • Content creators, authors, publishers & editors
  2. Maintainers
    • People who install WordPress
    • People who maintain WordPress sites

Note that we did not include developers as they would largely be redirected to DevHub.

Inside each of the personas there will also be three levels of experience: Beginner, Intermediate and Experienced. There will obviously be some crossover in the content with regards to the personas, but that’s normal and expected.

Next steps

The next steps from here are to start planning the content for each of the personas as well as to start working on the wireframes with the personas in mind. That will be the work for the next little while, so the next few weekly chats (13:00 UTC on Tuesdays) will be updates on the progress there.

The info on how to get involved, as well as where we’ll be doing the work, are all on the HelpHub project page.

Feedback needed

We would appreciate feedback on the user personas from the Docs & Support teams, so if you have any input on that side of things please comment on here.

#helphub, #recap

Drew Jaynes 7:03 pm on October 1, 2015
Tags: recap   

Docs Chat Recap, Oct. 1, 2015

Here’s a recap of the Oct. 1, 2015 Docs Chat:

Attendees: @nlarnold1, @lizkaraffa, @justingreerbbi, @justinsainton, @liamhogan, @slaffik, @samuelsidler, @drewapicture

Chat Archive (must be logged-in to Slack to read, sorry): https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/docs/p1443722420000955

  1. Project Updates
    1. Theme Developer Handbook – @lizkaraffa
      • @iwritten and @thoronos have been working on some good things the past week or so. @lizkaraffa will be going on maternity leave soon and feels that the “ship” can likely steer itself in her absence. Sounds like @thoronas might be a good point of contact as he knows most of what’s going on with the handbook currently.
    2. HelpHub – @hlashbrooke
      • @hlashbrooke wasn’t able to make it to the meeting, but he posted his update as a comment on the agenda post.
    3. Codex MigrationMigration Moving the code, database and media files for a website site from one server to another. Most typically done when changing hosting companies. – @drewapicture
      • The Codex Migration project is cruising along. I cleared out the moderation queue for examples the other week and will likely start redirecting more Codex pages in earnest this week based on our progress and readiness.
    4. Inline Docs – @drewapicture
      • I recently hit 1,000 commits for coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress., very possibly about 950 of those were for inline documentation, so yay for continuing to improve the quality of our inline documentation.
  2. “Weekly” Chats
    • We discussed continuing forward with meeting every other week, and doing weekly office hours during the normal chat time in the off weeks. This will allow new contributors to more easily get involved if they know we’ll be meeting/available at a consistent time.
  3. Open Floor
    • @slaffik raised a question about adjusting some now-defunct links for IDE packages on the inline docs standards, @drewapicture will take care of it.
    • @drewapicture is continuing work to improve particularly neglected areas of the core contributor handbook, including the “Automated Testing” article for unit testing.
    • A new contributor asked about how to get involved with contributing to the Codex Migration project, and links/information were shared.

#recap