Me too! I was hoping some of these fine folks might be interested as well:
@elberet, @oblakeerickson , @elberet, @trident, @sander78, @Mittineague, @DeanMarkTaylor, @cpradio, @mcwumbly & whoever else has some time and expertise to spare.
The core devs are swamped, yet there's a lot of groundwork that can be done by the community alone, so I figure we give that a shot.
The current state of affairs
Discourse’s documentation is in flux. Bits of information are spread across a wide assortment of sources:
- How-to threads
- ordinary threads (some in Dev and Features for instance)
- external forum threads (e.g. sitepoint)
- blogs (codinghorror.com, samsaffron.com, eviltrout.com...)
- github repositories (discourse/discourse, discourse/wp-discourse, discourse/discourse-tagging...)
I’d like to make all of this content aggregated into a centralised collection of documents, structured in a way that makes it easily digestible.
Two domains would suffice:
api.discourse.org
- A Slate wiki with @oblakeerickson’s API doc ported over and continued.
- Each section could have a “ask a question” link pre-filled with the Extensions category and some boilerplate text.
docs.discourse.org
- A Jekyll site.
- Corresponding Meta topic for each static page (i.e. a .markdown document).
- would have two main sections:
docs.discourse.org/dev/
A collection of developer-centric tutorials, from how to install Discourse to how to write plugins.
docs.discourse.org/guide/
User- and admin-centric tutorials and in-depth explanations of unique features such a Likes and Trust Levels, and in-depth explanations of moderation tools.
TO-DOs
The bulk of this work can be done without any direct involvement from the core developers. The sites can start off on an unofficial domain and lots of docs already exist in topics.
- Aggregate content that's spread across the web ( @erlend_sh )
- Set up Slate API site. ( @? )
- Set up basic Jekyll doc site. ( @? )
- Attach existing topics to corresponding docs ( @erlend_sh )
- Write User Guides ( @erlend_sh, @? )
- Write Developer Docs ( @? )
- Create custom Onebox engine for Meta ( @? )
Bonus: Make a boilerplate plugin!
I previously aired the idea of having a Discourse equivalent of the WordPress Plugin Boilerplate and it struck a chord. It seems @Mittineague has already made some great headway with a simple discourse plugin and a not so simple discourse plugin.
Perhaps this work could serve as the basis for an official "Discourse Plugin Boilerplate" tutorial + example code? (e.g. hosted in /discourse/example_plugin)