Version number in Documentation nodes

This comment written Sept 25, 2005; Current release of Drupal is 4.6.3

I am setting up a website for a small non-profit, primarily to give them the benefit of being able to easily edit their website, and perhaps to take advantage of other CMS features in the future. This means I'm not concerned about setting up comments or forums or votes at this point, but my primary focus is changing the 'look' to what we want. Drupal looks pretty good, so I've installed it, and have now started reading the documentation to figure out what I need to do to put together a theme for our site.

However, it seems that the documentation for Drupal doesn't follow a particular version of the software; this means that documentation, for example, for the Theme Developer's Guide, will have some pages written for 4.7, others written for 4.5.x, and others for 4.6.x, but the end reader won't know which version a particular page is talking about unless the author expressly mentions it in the body. To make it more confusing, when you go from one node to the next, the documentation may well be for a different version than what you are using - but nothing tells you this.

For example, the second node in the Theme Developers Guide,, http://drupal.org/node/29140, does indicate, in the text that it is talking about a feature - regions - that is not introduced until 4.7, which at the time of writing is CVS. If you keep clicking on to the 'next' page in the documentation, one might assume that each subsequent page is still talking about 4.7, as there isn't any further mention of versions. However, in the phptemplate documentation, at http://drupal.org/node/29140, there is a comment that the documentation is out of date as of 4.6.x - presumably the page in question was written for 4.5.x. So now a reader is thinking - what about all the other pages I just read through? What version were they talking about? Are the instructions different for the version I am using?

I'm not sure what the best way todeal with this issue is, but despite there being excellent documentation for Drupal, it is organized to look as though the different pages are sequential, when they may generally not be... this is quite confusing for anyone new to Drupal. Could the documentation be organized so that the link was for the same version - even if the page was empty, that would be better than getting instructions that may not apply to a newer or older verison. Alternatively, as a quick fix to this problem, could the documentation indicate right at the top what verison it is talking about? Is the version number entered as a field when submitting documentation, and could that be incorporated into the display?

Just some suggestions; Drupal does look very promising for my project, and I figure I can eventually sort out the documentation to get something up and running, but I did get caught out on this one.

-- B.