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Hi, here's an assessment of how things are coming along from Joachim.

The documentation isn't ready at all by the look of it, so I'm really
not sure how useful this is to you as it's all blindlingly obvious
stuff.

- sizing of header elements doesnt match mockup
- wordmark too big
- top menu items too small
- lower menu items too big
- search box wrong
- Refine your search in wrong place
- Popular searches missing

- search box dropdown too slow
- 'Refine your search' persists when dropdown is out -- looks odd, as
if the new thing has appeared beneath it
- this is compounded by right/left align clash
- why radios and not checboxes? what if I want to search several areas?

- nothing in the content area matches mockup!
(Though: bug in mockup: "Installation Guides Making it even easier
for you to get started with Drupal" <-- baseline fault with this set
of lines)
(and TBH structure of information in mockup is hard to grasp)

Hi, I caught up with Add1sun on IRC and since the docs will be moving to a new subdomain, but not right away, the only thing to focus on for now is to improve the theming on the existing content, e.g., what's on http://staging3.drupal.org/handbooks

(But rename the path to /documentation for SEO purposes)

Leaving this issue open because someone technical will need to review this approach.

switching component

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We had a good collaborative session last Friday. Can you post your mockup here and/or make your changes appear on staging3?

My opinion:

The content of the documentation landing page should reflect what is currently on http://drupal.org/handbooks -- that is our current documentation book structure, our preferred organization of books into sections/topics, and our preferred descriptions of the books.

+1 to #7. I think that would be the consensus of the docs people.

A few more comments:

- I'm not keen on the "Hidden Gems" idea. It seems to me that the audience and their needs/background/etc are too broad and diverse for this to be useful. Maybe there's an audience for random stuff, but I think most people go to the documentation only when they have a specific task in mind. I'd rather use the available space for helping those people to find specific things.

- The Recently Updated tab on the mockup really doesn't belong there unless it's something that's only visible to the doc team. As with the previous point, the average user isn't really looking for random bits of information. It might be handy for me as a doc team person though.

- The one thing that I've been wanting for ages is just some taxonomy and views functionality so that we can offer both the traditional 'table of contents' approach that we have now, and wikipedia-style categories/taxonomy/tagging (eg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Documentaries_about_the_media) where an individual page could appear in several different categories and the user can drill up and down. It's not necessarily something we need for the reorg launch but I just wanted to note that it's something that would be very helpful down the road.

Yeah that looks better!

agreed, the skitch screenshot looks ++

and cross posting from #647986: Get Started section naming conflict as lisa suggested, the main heading above the handbook sections would best be something like "The Drupal Handbook" because it's the entire handbook, and really not an intro or getting started guide (which of course is also the name of one of the sections).

Good plan. Existing content, formatted like #9

http://drupal.org/handbook is a regular page, please edit it. The markup to make this happen can be tested on redesign.drupal.org, but will be replaced with a new copy from Drupal.org every day.

If the markup simply doesn't work, then you can write a node_save() into a drupalorg_update_65xx().

And bluecheese provides a css grid system for the columns - http://groups.drupal.org/node/56713#Layout_Basics_916091082404843_

Looking at the current test site http://redesign.drupal.org/handbook vs. the mockup in #9 http://img.skitch.com/20100209-x47y6hh1pym219ty41372ut8n8.jpg ...

- The current test site has more items in the top section, and is missing the two-column center section, as well as the bottom "books" section, and there is no "help us write documentation" block at all. So I guess this hasn't been implemented yet?

- Regarding the top section, I think the current test site is better -- it is organized into areas (Getting started, Creating a site, etc.), rather than being a flat list. Also there is more detail on the test site in the descriptions, which I think is helpful.

- Regarding the middle section on the JPG, I don't really see why separating out the "Learning Drupal" and "Reference" sections is such a good idea. I think the organization of the current test site (based on the current d.o page) is better, putting all of those sections in that order and all with the same look and with that level of detail in the descriptions... I don't think the proposal is horrible, but I don't think it's an improvement.

- The Examples for Developers project in the Writing your Own Code section link is missing. it should go into Reference? It's certainly a LOT more organized and more useful than the Code Snippets...

The attached HTML is the new content I would like put into http://drupal.org/node/26419/edit. The content is the same except:
- Merged first two sections
- Swapped two sections
- Used dl instead of table markup

Once propagated to http://redesign.drupal.org/handbook, which happens daily, the theme makes it look like the attached image.

Review from the documentation team is appreciated.

hey drumm - a few little inconsistencies with punctuation and tiny grammar fix - uploading an updated version of the html (which I'm sure you can diff if you want).

this has my thumbs up with the attached changes (though i am a tiny bit irked by the number of "etc." and would maybe rework that, but really not a big deal.

thanks!

ps. since i think this is at a "good enough" state to launch, going to mark as rtbc and we can always adjust down the line.

Changed on http://drupal.org/handbook, will automatically make it to http://redesign.drupal.org/handbook tomorrow. Agreed on a lot of 'etc.' Feel free to update by editing that page, just keep the general markup the same.

btw, http://groups.drupal.org/node/56713#Layout_Basics_916091082404843_ if you want to put other pages on a grid.

Awesome! Thanks Neil :) - I bookmarked the markup guide too (didn't know about that, so thx for the link). Will have a look through again and maybe try and tweak, remove the "etc"s later on.