It's become really obvious to me that drupal.org (and possibly subsites) needs a content strategy.

There's so many solutions being proposed/implemented right now (e.g. groups, marketplace, showcase) but what about a high level plan? We have probably never user tested content, and yet we know content is lacking in a lot of places.

I'm talking about the overarching stuff like ensuring content meets audience needs, deleting the old stuff, dealing with the About content, the whole success stories/case study situation being in 2 different content types, managing our multiple taxonomies (that are bigger now with Marketplace), multiple 'handbooks'/docs books ...that sort of thing. Forums....

This would be a pretty huge undertaking but I'm interested in driving this. I know what needs to get done, but when it comes to decision making and acting on those, I'm less clear. Organize this in groups.d.o?

The Docs team has a solid start on a content strategy. And we do have some guidelines in place, but it's probably time to revisit them, and add to them.

Some if this fits in to Prairie initiative.

Thoughts?

Comments

drumm’s picture

drumm
he/him
Location NY, US
commented

Yes!

leisareichelt’s picture

leisareichelt commented

Are you off being inspired at the IAS Lisa :)

Totally agree - there was some really early style-guide type work done as part of the d.o redesign - not sure if that is ever referenced?
There's also some significant crossover with general UX objectives as well so it would be great to work out a way to get this to work in concert with that (eg Prairie) rather than as a splinter initiative.

My gut feel is that we could do with starting with a big audit of the site and where it is lacking and a content strategy could begin to emerge from that exercise? How were you thinking we could kick this off?

drumm’s picture

drumm
he/him
Location NY, US
commented

We've been moving things from the static https://infrastructure.drupal.org/drupal.org-style-guide to drupal.org, so it can be community-owned and (hopefully) evolve with the site, and include implementation notes.

Style guide for text: http://drupal.org/contribute/documentation/guide/style
Everything else: http://drupal.org/node/1050556

lisarex’s picture

lisarex commented

Great, yes, a content inventory/audit is the place to start. I'd like to assemble a team of volunteers and analyse a couple sections, initially.

Neil, can you give me a login to scratch so I can put together a view, so that it can be exported to a Gdocs spreadsheet? For a smaller site, I'd like to avoid exporting to spreadsheet but d.o. is too big.

I have started http://drupal.org/project/content_audit but it needs a ton of love. I've already decided to take a slightly different approach....

PS Leisa, yes the IA Summit was very inspiring!

drumm’s picture

drumm
he/him
Location NY, US
commented

I started the build out of a dev site named "content," details on the setup are at http://drupal.org/node/1018084. It should be ready in about 20 minutes.

lisarex’s picture

lisarex commented

Thanks drumm.

http://groups.drupal.org/node/139814 is where the content audit discussion is taking place.

laura s’s picture

laura s commented

Good stuff. I promoted it to the g.d.o home page.

gdemet’s picture

gdemet
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Primary language English
Location Chicago, USA
commented

This is a very good idea. As much as possible, I'd like to see this effort coordinated with the Prairie Initiative, and the work that the docs team is doing.

lisarex’s picture

lisarex commented

Thanks Laura.
George, I've let Ariane and Jennifer know.

It would also be ideal for site visitors to report problems because there is absolutely no way even the most dedicated volunteers can do a deep dive on all the nodes.... so I filed this : http://drupal.org/node/1118990 :)

jhodgdon’s picture

jhodgdon
she/her
Primary language English
commented

I have always been a bit confused as to who is responsible for maintaining the content outside of "Documentation" on Drupal.org anyway, not to mention being confused about what exactly is on drupal.org outside of documentation. So I think this is a great idea.

But lisarex -- I'm not sure if you've yet articulated what you want your army of helpers to do. I read through this thread and the gdo post, skimmed through the two linked blogs (so I think I understand what a content inventory is), but I didn't get a clear sense of "If you want to help, here's what we are trying to make and here is what you can do, and here's where to report your findings". Since the gdo post is titled "Help needed"... ??? Just letting you know that that was my impression...

lisarex’s picture

lisarex commented

@jhodgdon, thanks for the comments, Jennifer. You make a good point that I haven't really explained what the heck I'm doing yet. Truthfully I'm a little behind and still thinking through the options. :)

I consider these to be non-Documentation:

Drupal.org FAQ - http://drupal.org/about/drupal.org-FAQ
About Drupal - http://drupal.org/about
Drupal CMS features - http://drupal.org/features
Reference - http://drupal.org/node/627210
Getting Involved Guide - http://drupal.org/getting-involved-guide
Marketplace - http://content.redesign.devdrupal.org/node/366
Working with Drupal service providers - http://drupal.org/node/995766
Getting Started - http://drupal.org/getting-started (this one is a gray area, but I'll include in the audit since there were plenty of volunteers!)

Does it seem reasonable I have folks focus on those first?

lisarex’s picture

lisarex commented

Another question for webmasters: Where should work on the content improvements live? I think the Webmaster queue makes the most sense, unless Content is it's own drupal.org project.

I think I'll need to introduce a tag 'drupal.org content audit' otherwise...

lisarex’s picture

lisarex commented

Created a Community Initiative page

http://drupal.org/community-initiatives/drupalorg-content-strategy

I <3 crosslinking.

silverwing’s picture

silverwing commented

If the issues are going to be created here, should we create a "Content audit" component?

lisarex’s picture

lisarex commented

silverwing, how about a general 'content' component?

silverwing’s picture

silverwing commented

I would like to avoid Component Overload, but keeping all these issues together should keep a little sanity in the queue.

Currently we have "Content moderation," "Site organization" and "Textual improvements" so perhaps have the issues filed under Site organization?

(I'm also starting to feel we should have a new Project Type called "Initiatives" that this and Prarie and HTML5 could use.)

lisarex’s picture

lisarex commented

Heh, content strategy work needs a content strategy.

Yes, the audit will probably generate issues that are both site IA/organization as well as others that are textual improvements. And no doubt some general content moderation policy issues will come out (e.g. "how do we handle x?") though my pleas re: how to handle Community Spotlight are not getting tons of attention:#928962: New Community Spotlight: discuss guidelines I'm sure there's a better way to handle promoting content to the front page now too.

I see the focus of Webmasters queue is handle user permissions, routine spam, project maintainer stuff, adding feeds to planet....Stuff that can be dealt with pretty swiftly... and that's often more technical in nature.

But drupal.org content stuff is a bit of a different beast, eh? The people who look after it will be more interested in the marketing of drupal.org, ensuring content is relevant and useful, etc.

So I'd definitely be in favor of splitting out the drupal.org content into it's own project (not shared with Initiatives). Content on drupal.org isn't an initiative and it isn't going to be "solved" with this audit. It's an ongoing forever thing. It's definitely one of the most "unloved" components of the Drupal ecosystem and it's had a negative impact on the perception of Drupal (see the Wake up community - Wordpress.org should scare you! post)

Not sure about an initiatives project, because moving issues out of one project and into another is a pain (the redesign project has issues collecting dust, and the redesign project is officially Obsolete now).

But improvements that come out of Prairie probably belong in drupalorg or or groupsdrupalorg issue queues, where the maintainers work.

lisarex’s picture

lisarex commented

And if folks want to keep these issues in Webmasters, would love to hear suggestions on whether to stick with existing components (I suspect that will be the case).
Thx!

drumm’s picture

drumm
he/him
Location NY, US
commented

I do not think a project for each initiative is a good idea. Tagging is much better suited to initiatives; issues can span across the theme, webmasters, infrastructure, and sometimes contrib. And the people who have been working on it in the past are the more likely to see issues in the same places.

alex ua’s picture

alex ua commented

I think this is great, but I also feel like the webmasters queue isn't the best place for content discussions/issues. I've thought we've needed a Content/Marketing issue queue for a long time, but either way, this is a great initiative.

lisarex’s picture

lisarex commented

Audit on a subsection of book nodes is done. The next step is to pull out details + annotations to a place where people can work on them, so we can give up the dev environment. Any volunteers?

tvn’s picture

tvn commented
Project: Drupal.org site moderators » Drupal.org content

Moving to Content project.

mgifford’s picture

mgifford
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Primary language English
commented
Issue summary: View changes
Issue tags: +prairie
Related issues: +#1133434: [META] Content Strategy for Drupal.org

Would be great if there was more discussion about this. Glad that the Drupal.org Content Improvements wiki is getting updated.

mgifford’s picture

mgifford
he/him
Primary language English
commented

Adding a link from the Prairie Initiative's GDO Page about this - https://groups.drupal.org/node/137039

lizzjoy’s picture

lizzjoy
she/her
Primary language English
Location Ann Arbor
commented
Status: Active » Closed (won't fix)

There is new content strategy work happening and I'm going to close this issue at this point. Check out the post about the progress so far: https://www.drupal.org/news/content-strategy-update-february-2015