Hello from Jennifer, your outgoing Drupal Documentation Team leader! As I step down as leader of the Documentation team, I wanted to make one last quarterly status update post for the Documentation Team.

Leadership Change

People in the Drupal project are currently exploring Drupal community governance, and among the questions they’ll be thinking about are the leadership and structure of the Documentation Team — so expect an announcement sometime soon! In the meantime, I’m not going to be hosting Documentation Office Hours, but if someone else wants to schedule an Office Hours, go ahead and post an event to the Documentation groups.drupal.org page.

Milestones, Accomplishments, and Projects in progress

• Lots of content was updated on Drupal.org this quarter. Of particular note:
• The Accessibility team worked on updating documentation at a sprint in Montreal, including the Creating accessible themes section, and the best practices on accessibility for site builders page.
• The Multilingual team updated both in-code API documentation and on-line Community documentation for Drupal’s multi-lingual system.
• The Mobile team organized and created a Mobile guide.
• I’m sure there are other notable updates that I didn’t mention specifically — 921 different contributors made more than 5000 revisions to documentation pages on Drupal.org this quarter — thanks to everyone who made an edit or created new documentation!
• There’s a new Community Documentation Moderator group! These dedicated individuals will be overseeing the Community Documentation, and doing tasks that the general Drupal community members do not have the permissions to do (deleting comments, making edits on locked pages, creating URL aliases and redirects, etc.). I’d like to especially thank Boris/batigolix for joining the Moderator group and dealing with so many Documentation project issues in the past few weeks — I’m sure he’d appreciate some help though, so please join him! (Responsibilities and instructions for how to get started: http://drupal.org/node/1588928)
• The API documentation cleanup sprint from last quarter has continued into this quarter, and a lot of progress has been made! The goal is to bring the Drupal 7 and 8 core API documentation much more in line with our documentation standards. To join in, visit the issue page. There is also a related sprint for general PHP coding standards at http://drupal.org/node/1518116
• Work on the proposed Curated/Official Docs and Help system has picked up! We have an issue to track progress on building the system, and Google Summer of Code participant Gergely Tamás Kurucz (temaruk) is working on a major component this summer. WorldFallz has also just volunteered to work on the workflow piece of the project, so hopefully around the end of the summer, we’ll be able to deploy the first phase of the system, and start writing “official/curated” documentation. But we will still need some programming help — check the tracking issue for more details.
• The “Books about Drupal” section is being revised to have a new content type and a View, instead of being a set of flat HTML pages. Lowell/LoMo has been working on that, and we hope to get it finished and deployed on Drupal.org in the next few weeks. Issue: http://drupal.org/node/1487988
• Many members of the Drupal documentation team collaborated last quarter on proposing an update to the sidebar navigation for the Community Documentation. We reached consensus that we would like to have +/- expand/contract ability on the sidebar, so that people searching for documentation could more easily drill down into the book structure to find pages of interest. But we need some help: evaluating existing modules to see if they will work for us, and if not, building a module that will. If you’d like to help, the issue is: http://drupal.org/node/1508832
• The API module (the module behind http://api.drupal.org, the programmer API documentation reference site) has been ported to Drupal 7. I did the primary port, and several people contributed by testing it out and/or posting patches for bugs they found. api.drupal.org should be running Drupal 7 sometime soon! The next new features planned for the site are to get more contributed modules visible, make it work correctly with PHP namespaces (which are extensively being used in Drupal 8), and replace the hard-to-maintain Form API reference with an automatically-generated page (and in-code comments). If you’d like to help with these efforts, check the API module issue queue.

Next Steps

If you’re interested in helping with Drupal documentation:

• New contributors: Check out the tasks in the New Contributor Tasks section, or read http://drupal.org/contribute/documentation to learn all about contributing to documentation. Or come to the weekly office hours (see Events section above) to ask questions and get started.
• Become a Community Documentation Moderator: http://drupal.org/node/1588928
• Drupal Documentation announcements, discussions, and events are always posted on http://groups.drupal.org/documentation-team and sometimes posted on Twitter (@drupaldocs). Why not join the group (you can sign up for email notifications), and follow us on Twitter?
• API documentation cleanup sprint (for programmer-documenters): http://drupal.org/node/1310084
• Work on API module features: http://drupal.org/project/issues/api
• Help evaluate modules or build a new one for better Community Documentation sidebar navigation: http://drupal.org/node/1508832
• Help build the Curated/Official Docs/Help system: http://drupal.org/node/1549580