By ronaldmulero on

In an attempt to illustrate a coherent "overhead view" of all the documentation at drupal.org and to suggest one possible "landing page" for the Documentation section, I've created a dynamic (javascript/HTML) outline of pretty much all of the Documentation at drupal.org. The outline itself is a logical hierarchy of links to the documentation, audio, and video at drupal.org. It also includes seperate indexes of the drupal audio and video, just for the sake of completeness.

Essentially, it's a portable front-end to the documented knowledge of the Drupal Project to-date.

It's useful for the following reasons:

  1. It presents the user with an orderly approach to the Drupal Project, by rearranging the links to the existing documentation at drupal.org.
  2. The first levels suggest the structure of one possible "landing page" for the Documentation section of drupal.org.
  3. It's just one html file (724 KB), so it can be hosted anywhere, even as a local copy on a user's computer.
  4. At the moment (as of Drupalcon Boston 2008 + a few days), it is relatively up-to-date.
  5. It can be easily edited and updated by anyone, so it can remain up-to-date.
  6. It is Creative Commons, Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0.
  7. It's been tested in Firefox and Opera.

The javascript/HTML file can be viewed at:
http://www.ronaldmulero.com/drupalstuff/DrupalProject_KnowledgeGUI.Beta....

Hints:

  1. Open the html file in Firefox and casually browse through the outline by clicking on the + or - icons next to each subheading. (In Opera, click just to the right of each subheading.)
  2. Click directly on a linked subheading or term and it will take you to the corresponding page at drupal.org.
  3. To expand the whole outline, click on the "Expand" button on the top-right of the document. Then use your browser's search feature to search for any term that interests you (e.g. "tips and tricks" or "api" or "RSS"). Then follow the link to drupal.org.
  4. Save a copy for your personal use:
    Just save the page (with images) to your local drive.

Editing:

The free Java program that I used to create the html file is called "Freemind" and can be found at:
http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
It's relatively easy to learn.

The original "DrupalProject_KnowledgeGUI.Beta.mm" Freemind diagram can be downloaded at:
http://www.ronaldmulero.com/drupalstuff/DrupalProject_KnowledgeGUI.Beta.mm

When you're done editing the .mm file, just save it, then export it "As XHTML (Javascript version)". Your default web browser will automatically open the exported file.

P.S.

If you're thinking of printing a hard copy of interesting parts of the outline (and/or you're really into visual presentations of knowledge), then the .mm file is definitely the file to use. :)

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

zilla’s picture

zilla commented

thank you. this is excellent and should be linked to directly from the handbook one day - but the only thing missing is versioning codes, something i'd like to see added to current handbook so that users could begin to update legacy documentation (a lot of those 4.7 block and page snippets don't work anymore, or they describe processes and modules that are now core, etc)

could this be implemented with a versioning layer as a top level filter (e.g. 'show me only the stuff that bears relevance to d5 or d6 or whatever)?

ronaldmulero’s picture

ronaldmulero commented

Yes, it is possible. The outline was created with the 8.1 version of Freemind. However, the 9.0 Release Candidate version of Freemind allows the user to attach descriptive attributes (ie. "Drupal 5.x", "Drupal 6.x ", "Drupal 7.x") to any leaf in an outline, which could then be used to filter how the outline is displayed.

Looks like serious effort has been made to include versioning codes in Drupal Documentation as a taxonomy term (top-right corner of the main content area of many pages), though it doesn't look complete yet. And I agree, it would be nicer if the versioning information were included in the Topic Titles instead, as recommended by the Documentation Writer's Guide (http://drupal.org/node/336), to make searching Documentation by version easier—both at drupal.org and in any future versions of the above outline.

catch’s picture

catch
he/him
Primary language English
commented

Please note that this forum is deprecated. This post should ideally go in the documentation mailing list because no-one should be looking in here any more. I only found it because it was linked from groups.