Draft for d.o. front page announcement

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The Theming Handbook is being reorganized!

One of the documentation team's current projects is to consolidate all the theming-related handbook pages into a single book. A theming docs workgroup is now forming to focus on this project, and as a first step documentation team coordinator Addison Berry (add1sun) will merge [Q?] has merged the above pages into a single Consolidated Theming Guide (currently the D6 guide [Q?] confirm link).

There are currently seven main locations for theming information in the drupal.org handbooks:

• D6 theming handbook
• D5- theming handbook
• Beyond the Basics: Theme HowTos
• BtB: Theming snippets
• BtB: Theming videos
• BtB: Contrib themes
• BtB: Comparisons of contrib themes

plus of course many valuable contributions scattered around in other parts of the Handbooks.

In merging these books and branches, existing links, both to individual nodes numbers and path aliases, will be preserved as much as possible. Note that some sets of theming-related pages will not be moved:

• all the automatically generated pages within the automated API documentation system, e.g. core template.php
• the stream of discussions flowing through the forums
• those pages pertaining to specific contrib modules, e.g. Theming Views

In fact, module-specific pages currently in the above locations will be moved out to the relevant module's doc pages.

Any interested documentation team members are invited to join in this effort; others that would like to contribute should first request to join the docs team.

Please visit the documentation team's Groups page [Q?] Addi - new landing page? for further information.

Note that as part of the current overall drupal.org redesign project, there are more general discussions going on about a full re-structuring of Drupal's documentation. The documentation team's reorganizing the theming content (some say one of the already better organized topics in the Handbook) will help us contribute to the larger project as well.

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Add1sun - rather than linking from this announcement to an issue in the queue or the mailing list, let's create a landing page in GDO with comments on, I think the interface will be more familiar to the non-docs-team people that will be coming to read up on further details and discussion.

Not mentioning Diigo in this, originally had a

If you want to participate in the tagging/navigation of the current theme-related Handbook content

but I don't want people joining the team just because they want to play with a new tool, just those interested in the project goals themselves. Plus I don't want people to think d.o. is promoting a specific unrelated tool if this does get promoted to front.

Ideally there should be an additional thread specifically for Diigo - I'd like a prominent place for usage guidelines visible before they actually come to join, and that I can link to when (gently) slapping wrists. I think it's very important that we keep the team's official d.o. media (issue queue, groups-or-maillist) the primary location for substantive discussions, and restrict Diigo to temporary tags and navigation hierarchy ideas and bookmarks specific to handbook pages (currently theming nodes specifically).

I don't want to be too heavy-handed about this, but I think it's important not to further splinter/dilute important content discussions, and keep a tight focus on the current project within Diigo, I can see that becoming yet another mishmash haystack otherwise.

Heather or I will post revisions to the guidelines there (or channel them through you) and also post a "Go see the usage guidelines" message at the top of the Diigo board.

Feedback welcome from any and all!

Thanks Addi!

Two issues:

>feel free to make it a forum post

I guess it's safe for me to assume you mean to this forum as the other FP items seem to come from there as well.

But I'd like to edit the landing page a bit also before it goes live. . .

However when I go to the project wiki page it gives me the "join the group and then edit it" link, but that goes here and I get Access Denied. I don't see any other "Edit this page" type links or tabs.

I probably created duplicate (or close to) usernames on GDO in the past before I started using Sxipper, I believe the one I currently use (Sxipper auto-logins me) is "HansBKK@drupal.org", which (I think?) authenticates me against my "main" one on d.o.

Edit: Yes, I was able to find the redundant (inactive) username/password, I renamed it to "HansBKK-do not use". That is the one you point to as a contact link on the current project page, so that'll be the first thing I change there. I'd like to set it to my main drupal.org user page, if that's not a problem; I know people have been able to contact me from there, don't know about the groups one.

The active GDO account (used to be "HansBKK@drupal.org") is http://groups.drupal.org/user/19429; I renamed it to HansBKK.

Sorry for the confusion, but do please set give that user the wiki rights as well. In the meantime I'll get going editing the landing page under the old username and the forum post.

PS How can I get the redundant userID deleted, short of emailing Moshe? :) It's tracker is completely empty, so I can't see any need to keep it once you've enabled the active one.

I was in the middle of editing the project page under the "wrong" username, and I was doing yet another preview when I suddenly got "access denied". Presumably Addi was fixing the problem :)

Fortunately I'd done most of my editing in JEdit, so I'm posting a copy here for now while I try re-logging in.

Draft start

The separation of the Drupal 6 theme guide from the rest of the theming-related handbook information has created frustration and an unsustainable path for forward maintenance, so we are going to reorganize them back into one book. The original issue discussing this project was Reorganize Theme handbooks and the currently active one is now Theming doc workgroup forming.

HansBKK has taken the lead on this sub-team to get the handbook somewhat sane for this topic area, and will be the main point of contact for questions.

Team tools

To help them classify and re-organize the relevant pages, the team will be using Diigo, a "social bookmarking" tools, where they have created a group called drupal-docs.

• shared bookmarks with a standard tag set for tagging pages
• comments are displayed to team members automatically while browsing, discussion takes place right on the handbook page
• "sticky notes" can contain discussion about a particular section of the page, as can specific highlighted text
• no copy/pasting links and text back and forth
• less chatter cluttering up the main doc team's discussion channels
• works via browser extension (or bookmarklet) + diigo.com web interface

Pitch in!

Qualified Drupallers are invited to join in and help; any level of participation is welcome. As this is a sub-group of the documentation group, you must first be a member of the docs team; here's how to join. You should also have a reasonable amount of theming experience, although relative newbies can also contribute valuable feedback relevant to their needs, and will certainly learn a lot by participating in the project.

Once accepted to the main team, first sign up with Diigo, then come to drupal-docs there and request to join the group.

Play around and become familiar with Diigo by creating some private bookmarks and try commenting via sticky notes and highlighting text. Then go to the head of the theming guide and try posting some sticky notes to pages there and sharing them to the group. Also check out the group's Diigo forum.

It is important for the rest of the docs team to not be excluded from important decisions, so we are putting some guidelines in place for using this tool.

Also, the workgroup will post recommendations via issues to the main documentation queue for feedback before making major structural changes, and give a status report every couple of weeks.

Diigo guidelines

• bookmarks and page annotations shared to the group should be
• to/on drupal.org pages only, and
• for now, limited to theming-related pages only
• feel free to link to any other relevant pages within your comments, or create your own group for talking about other topics on Diigo
• Diigo's discussion facilities should primarily be used for "meta" issues like page classification and navigation hierarchy
• substantive discussions about page content or other issues should take place in the main docs-team channels on d.o.

These guidelines will be regularly revised as needed, so theming workgroup members using this tool should return here to review them once in a while. We are also investigating other tools, in particular real-time collaborative editors.

Draft end

Yep, that was it, but no problem, edited landing page in place

Thanks Addi!

I realized that my post was too long, the most important information would fall below the read-more break, and much of it wouldn't be valid once the merge took place. So I moved most of its content to the project landing page on GDO.

Here's the new version; Addi, note the date change, I don't want it to only still be Saturday on Easter Island :) but I'll check back here again shortly.

If you catch this early enough and tell me to I'll change it back.

<draft>

While many people say that Theming is one of the better organized topics in Drupal's documentation, many have expressed frustration that relevant pages are located in a variety of different branches, and even separate handbooks. The documentation team has also realized that this has created an unsustainable path for forward maintenance. Therefore, as a first step, we are going to merge nearly all theming-related information into a single Consolidated Theming Guide on Sunday, 23 November, to be located at http://drupal.org/theme-guide (currently pointing to the Drupal 6 Theme Guide). Existing links, both to individual nodes numbers and path aliases, will be preserved as much as possible.

A theming docs workgroup is now forming to focus on reorganizing the new book's navigation hierarchy; for further information please visit the group's project page.

</draft>

4:15am here, gotta get to bed, went ahead and posted:

http://drupal.org/node/337857

Everything removed from the original version Addi approved is in the project page, albeit somewhat reworded and very much re-organized IMO for the better of course.

g'night (yawn)

OMG the glory! :)