Come together with the global Drupal community in Rotterdam, 28 Sept – 1 Oct 2026. Sessions, contribution, connection, and Early Bird savings until 8 June.End user guide 4.7 -> http://drupal.org/node/6261
There's bucket loads of info on drupal.org for people administrating drupal sites, but not much in the way of end-user documentation. When it comes down to it, in many situations a site will have far more end users than admins - content editors and forum moderators and the like.
The 4.7 end-user guide is pretty cool, covering most things. It could really do with some images to complement the descriptions, and of course there's bound to be some stuff that's out of date for drupal 6. It would also be good to get a similar set of docs up for drupal 7 soonish, as admins will be wanting to upgrade their sites, and the new user interface is significantly different.
I'm happy to do some work on this, perhaps even adding some content from our own client guide, if it seems appropriate.
So, firstly, what's the best way of going about this? Should we move (un-archive) and update the 4.7 page, and create version-specific sub pages where there are large differences, or should we create a whole new book for each major version?
Comments
Comment #1
naught101 commentedSomething that might be useful to add is a simple glossary - one page, with no more than one or two sentences on phrases used in drupal core. Some discussion here: http://drupal.org/node/38098
Comment #2
naught101 commentedBasis for an end-user glossary? http://drupal.org/getting-started/before/terminology
Comment #3
leehunter commentedI'm not sure that a user guide (i.e. separate from the admin guide) really belongs in the Drupal documentation. Most sites are relatively customized with a wide range of features and functionality, different audiences, permission settings and different interfaces so it's not clear that there's value in targetting such a diverse and unknowable audience.
Certainly we need to document the generic tasks of searching, adding and removing content etc. but communicating a site to the end user is the job of the site development team.
Comment #4
naught101 commentedLee: part of the reason I was posting this is that we already have a fairly complex end-user guide document (10 pages). I would guess about 60% of it is applicable to all sites, and 95% is applicable to other sites, in a pick-and-mix fashion.
Basically, I think an end-user guide would be most useful as a template for drupal developers to use, modify, and give to their clients. Just like drupal itself :)
Comment #5
arianek commentedLike Lee was saying, because sites are usually so heavily customized, it is difficult to create such a thing. I did make a dowloadable (openoffice) template end-user guide back in D5 days that is posted if you would find it useful as a starting point: http://groups.drupal.org/node/13374
If you want to help out with the online docs, you might want to direct efforts to http://drupal.org/handbook/customization/tutorials/beginners-cookbook which is a basic new-to-Drupal guide, and includes basic intros to things like creating content and menus within it. I am pretty sure it is in need of some love, and will even more so in prep for D7.
Comment #6
kattekrab commentedCurrently sitting in the Sunday doc sprint DrupalConSF. After chatting with LeeHunter have started to review the end-user guide - and then we'll see about bringing it up to the cookbook and comparing with the newer beginners cookbook.
I agree there is a challenge to create good generic documentation for end users given the degree to which a lot of this is customised on a site by site basis, but there are still a lot of users out there struggling from scratch on their own. So I see two audiences for this work... one is the pure DIY people, and the other is for site developers to use as a foundation document they can customise for their clients.
Comment #7
leehunter commentedChatting with kattekrab at drupalcon it became clear that this is actually a tutorial thing, rather than straight product documentation. It will fit well in the Tutorials section of the landing page.
Comment #8
arianek commentedthere's a section for end-user/site admin guide templates here http://drupal.org/node/936482 if anyone wants to add to that. marking this fixed. thanks!