Improving documentation from the point of a new user/developer/architect

MIsc
13 Core/mvp people met at a country house in Denmark prior to CodeGarden 08 to discuss "What is umbraco". We used the format "Open Space Technology" and these are the minutes from the different sessions.

Chapters

• Chapter 1: What Needs Doing that Isn’t Being Done?(or, how you can help the umbraco project)
• Chapter 2: The Umbraco “elevator speech”
• Chapter 3: Keeping Tabs On Direction - the balance between community and company
• Chapter 4: Improving documentation from the point of a new user/developer/architect
• Chapter 5: Dividing Umbraco be divided into to separate projects
• Chapter 6: Sharing implementation experiences and discussing how to support web builders even better

Improving documentation from the point of a new user/developer/architect

Contributors:

• Kim Lowert
• Paul Sterling
• Warren Buckley
• Casey Neehouse
• Thomas Höhler

For umbraco there is a lot of documentation. Nearly everything that new users, developer or architects are needing is existing at some place. But where? There are several main places where to look:

• Umbraco Books
• the old umbraco wiki
• the umbraco forum
• the main umbraco blog
• some private blogs from core members and MVPs

The main problem is that this documentation is distributed and there is no read line which says "If you have this experience and this goal to reach then got to this section", especially for new users, developers and architects.

The red line for the documentation depends also on what the new person wants to do. There are three categories of people who have the need for documentation:

• users: the people who are new backend users (Writers or Editors in umbraco usage). They need a documentation how to add or delete new items, how to assign a hostname ors something in this direction.
• developers: the people who have to set up umbraco. They need a documentation how to install and maintain umbraco
• architects: the people who have to create the website layout and the structure. They need a documentation what document types, templates and nodes are and how they together get a website.

For the users it would also be helpfully to reactivate the context sensitive help in the backend

Goal should be to create three documents with documentation links to provide a red line to the users, developers and architects.

Secondary goal could be to get these documentation together in at least one document eg. a PDF.