g.d.o website needs a better site usage guide

#1680350: Include link to groupsdrupalorg issue queue from groups.drupal.org may be of interest here. For what it's worth, that issue was closed.

I believe the footer is part of Bluecheese, standard across all drupal.org subdomains using that theme, so customizing it for GDO probably isn't an option.

I'd be okay with putting something in the header navigation, maybe also shortening "About this site" to just "About" so we're not making that too big. Linking directly to the issue queue with no context seems likely to confuse, especially since some problems don't belong in the issue queue. So we probably need a page describing different places to take different types of problems. Maybe something like http://drupal.org/support would be good?

The "Report an issue" category of links at http://drupal.org/support looks great, but I think that linking to that page will likely fill up the Drupal.org webmasters queue with reports of spam on groups.drupal.org.

How about listing highly reported issues (spam, new group proposals, account problems, etc.) at the top of the "About this site" page and then renaming it to "FAQ" or "Help" to make it easier to spot? That would be a helpful change, and making it a wiki page would be even better, IMO.

Although the difference is very small and applies only to the localize- and api- sites, it seems that the footer is not standard across all d.o subdomains. So adding a link to the "About" column in g.d.o's footer is a valid option. But a label like "G.d.o Website Problems" under the About heading (or in any other column there) gets too specific. ("About Drupal Groups", maybe instead of the "Advertise" link, seems more suitable. But of course one can always question the point of repeating the already existing link in the header. Anyway that footer discussion is another issue.)

Providing a link in the header to an "about" page instead of directly the issue queue, which is the actual situation, is quite reasonable, by shortening "About this site" to just "About".

I agree that the About page needs some editing, taking http://drupal.org/support as an example, adding highly reported issues and some g.d.o specific resources, and making it a wiki page (or a book).

For reference, it looks like the footer nav is added here:

http://drupalcode.org/project/drupalorg_crosssite.git/blob/refs/heads/6....

I'm guessing some sites are altering that with a site-specific preprocess.

I think the about page should be revised, but I don't think it should be changing as often as a wiki. There's an old issue for revising the about page here: #1482908: Revise about page content. Let's use that to discuss specific changes.

I do think a site usage guide would be good as a wiki. That should maybe go under http://drupal.org/documentation If that sounds good to others, I think we need to open an issue under documentation to get a new section added, as I don't see a relevant section currently.

Scott, thanks for calling attention to Revise about page content issue; how I overlooked it!

But still I think the About page would be designed as the gateway of the usage guide. And I totally agree you when you comment as:

we also need to update the page content, but that's probably a longer process. My general thoughts on that is we should focus the content on what people will be looking for on this page, and make it very short with links to more detail elsewhere.

So a wiki, or better a book with About page being the root, would be more suitable for such a structure.

For the location, most users would prefer to see the guide of a site within the same site, not under http://drupal.org/documentation. Also we have to consider the community members who only visit the Groups but not d.o.

For deciding where to go on this discussion I would suggest this thread although it is newer than the other one because much more have been already told here and the other issue seems related more with the form and location not the content, and resolved after the "old page" being swapped with the "about-new" page.

I don't think we should combine the two discussions at all. Right now there's nothing to add to the about page, because we don't have a wiki yet. When we do, we should add a link from the about page, but there's plenty of other work to happen on the about page that has nothing to do with site usage, so I think they're very much separate issues, though somewhat related. Let's talk about site usage guides here and when we have something to add to the about page, take that to the about page discussion. We don't yet have anything to add, so let's focus on that.

For location, we don't currently have a place to put documentation on groups.drupal.org, so going that direction will slow this down a lot. I don't see a lot of value in duplicating the documentation structure that already exists on Drupal.org. If we have a lot of people on GDO who aren't comfortable visiting Drupal.org, we should fix that. GDO is intended as a way to get people more involved in the Drupal community, not an independent island.

The footer is standard across all *.d.o sites and we do not customize it per site. The reason for differences on the 2 sites listed is that "Social Media Directory" link was added recently and those sub-sites don't yet have the latest version of drupalorg_crosssite module deployed.

As for documentation about g.d.o - here is the section in the Getting Involved Guide
https://drupal.org/node/1158216.

Thanks for the links, tvn!

It looks like anyone can edit the GDO section of the Getting Involved Guide, so I think we can close this issue and start adding useful information there. When #1482908: Revise about page content has had a bit more time for feedback, I'll add a prominent link from there to the guide.

tvn, thanks for the brilliant guidance, experience saved us once again. Btw as you are at hand can you advice on changing the menu title "About this site" to just "About"? Open a new issue or continue #1054426: Groups.drupal.org redesign navigation or else?

And sreynen, if only you could wait a bit, at least a few hours for our timezone difference, before closing this issue.

I still have doubts on documenting g.d.o at d.o because first keeping the guide inside the site goes better with the trend to move navigation from shared to site-specific (see e.g. #1482908: Revise about page content) and second it is a good usability practice. The g.d.o section of the Getting Involved Guide seems to be written before g.d.o branding got heavier as it became today.

#7, "...don't see a lot of value in duplicating the documentation structure that already exists on Drupal.org" is out of context here because we are discussing about the g.d.o-specific documentation with links to related projects or issues, general documentation etc. as needed. Evidently nobody is trying to create an "independent island" but a handy guide here.

To sum up, such decisions should be taken after a proper discussion considering every aspect including the heavy work of moving huge amount of information with inner links in the future.

Anyway I'll follow the community decision and already done some editing at d.o and not eager to be the one who re-activates this issue.

I think About link can be dealt with in #1482908: Revise about page content, no need to re-open old issues.

Sahin, I didn't mean to pre-empt further discussion and would encourage you to re-open issues when you feel strongly they're not really resolved.

For me "keeping the guide inside the site" includes putting it on drupal.org, as I think of groups.drupal.org as a sub-section of the larger Drupal site. It's obviously a different subdomain and code base, but a lot of work has gone into giving all the *.drupal.org sites the same interface, accounts, etc. Moving from one site to another is intended to feel like moving to a different section on the same site. That may not be perfect yet, but that's the direction we're moving: toward more integration between the subsites. Creating a new documentation section on groups.drupal.org when we already have a place for that on drupal.org feels like moving in the opposite direction.

I also think you're understating the effort involved. Drupal.org has custom code, content, configurations, and a team in place for managing documentation. We have none of that on groups.drupal.org.

@sreynen, a few words only for your last post: First, fixing the issue in less than 4 hours after tvn posted some information is not an encouragement in my dictionary. The problem is not to close this issue but making this in an improper way. Second, "...the direction we're moving: toward more integration between the subsites" sounds irrelevant at least for g.d.o, especially when the site is under transition towards a more community based distribution which will increase the g.d.o-specific topics.

The rest is already told under #6 and #10.

Sahin, I believe you are confusing "fixed" and "fixed (closed)" statuses. See: http://drupal.org/node/156119#fixed "This gives interested parties time to reactivate the issue if they see a problem with the fix." That's what I encouraged you to do.