Breaking the existing Drupal handbook into multiple books

Any way to see some sort of statistics on the cluster analysis or some sort of weight for user preferences? I really don't know how the clusters are generated, but I'm concerned since the graph doesn't indicate where user might have been closely split.

I see the card sorting as a good general guide. But to take full advantage of it, we need some additional information because

1) we don't know much about our sample set (although I would guess that it is heavily weighted toward developers and accomplished administrators).

2) we don't know whether, for example 49% of users liked one grouping and 51% another. If we were more aware of the grouping choices and felt that where 49% of users chose to group it probably was a better choice for the main audience we imagine, we would know to override the majority.

Also, knowing if say 2/3 of users liked grouping A and 1/3 liked grouping B would suggest that we need to make sure we include a page (if it is a section being grouped) or a link (for only one page) in grouping B to point users with that expectation to the right book/section/page.

Meanwhile, I think that Djun's suggestions of Cookbook and Hacks would fit in those groupings. Seems like it's easy enough to have a Cookbook section and a Hacks section using the four book structure. Is there an advantage to having these outside of those books?

As for the fifth book, I thought we might want to keep documentation writing/documentation project teams out of the development section because people associate developing with code. Does this make sense?

"Djun's suggestion is useful, but perhaps a snippet is best placed in context... for example, block snippets under blocks, book modifications under the book module. I still wonder about the feasibility of perhaps tagging all these pages with 'code hacks' and then we could easily create listings of all pages which have code modifications."

+1 for tagging.

So we don't get off track, first we have to reorganize the books. So let's say that we will definitely be planning on how to tag the handbook once we get the handbook pages reorganized. If someone wants to begin collecting ideas now, then I'd suggest creating a new issue specifically about tagging the handbook(s). But let's not plan on making any decisions about tagging the handbook until we are done (or almost done) restructuring because what and how we tag will in part be dependent on how we structure the handbook(s).

Second, so we also stay on track, let's focus on general structures now: how many books, what will be the title/focus, and roughly, what will go in them (what do we need to move now). No need to figure out exactly where every single page will go yet. I think we can do this now without statistical data on the clustering (that' s me getting us off track :-) I also personally think that is too hard a task/taking on too much at once because we'll get caught up in the specifics rather than deciding on the big picture.

Then once we have the general structure, we can create new issues for each new book and decide more specifically what goes in them and how they are to be restructured (if necessary).

"Of course if you don't think that we should use statistical methods to organize the handbook, then I suppose we could just you know, wing it ;-)

I feel strongly that we settled the handbook titles and the number of handbooks a few months back. Let's end that discussion and move to organizing each book."

Definitely additional statistics would be useful for organizing the individual books (does someone want to take this on and create a new issue?). As for what was decided, Bryan K had created five books which are essentially the same as above except that for the Drupal documentation part he had "About the handbook." Was this what was decided? If so, I'll separate the handbook this weekend. I'll leave the translator's guide in the Developing section for the moment (based upon the graph). We can let the translators decide where they want it since they are the target audience after all.

I held off on breaking up the handbook for the moment for a few reasons:

1. To see if the books page Dries plans to enable will replace the current "handbook" page. If not, the handbook page should probably be recreated using page.module with a list of all the books we'll be creating.
2. We need a mechanism for letting users know when they are in one book about the other books. Could just be a page at the top tier of each book. The only title I can think of at the moment is "Consult other handbooks" or "To learn more"
3. We'll need to announce to the community about the change at the point the new books are created.

As noted in this post to the community now on the drupal.org home page, the I've broken the text up into multiple books and created a new handbook page.

Things left to do:

• For the moment, I put the marketing resources in the About Drupal section. The card sort had them in the installation and upgrading section (didn't seem to make sense there).
• Do we now have multiple handbooks? Or is there one handbook with multiple guides or sections? The latter will sort of be confusing when thinking in terms of collaborative books. Assuming the former, there will be many places to update to plural throughout the text.
• Lots of reorganizing to do. I've mainly just moved the main areas into the relevant sections.

This has been done for a while. Marking fixed.

closed