Two weeks ago I attended the GNOME Development Documentation and Tools Hackfest. Since then I’ve been working a bit on Mallard documentation for Evolution. It’s a complex task and I am happy that Barbara Tobias has offered her help. You can follow the development on gitorious.org. To take a look, clone it and run “yelp .” in the checkout directory.
Ignoring my own plan (something I already expected to happen when writing it up) I spent time thinking of structure and categorization of help topics and turned my “expressionist dance” drawing into a small but still confusing inkscape graphic that I’ve been enhancing over the last days while going through the old manual (the numbers in the picture refer to sections in the old manual):
Interesting sources for stuff to cover could be the FAQ, the old documentation (though the license is incompatible), the recent posts on the user mailing list, and recent bug reports that have been closed as INVALID (often because of misconfiguration issues or support questions instead of real software bugs).
I also hope to turn finishing some stub help pages into Google Code-In tasks. Yesterday I created the first task for documenting the search functionalities.
Help is welcome if you are brave enough to tame the beast.
Hey Andre,
It would be good to do a topic brainstorming session on IRC some time. I think a good area to tackle first would be creating/editing accounts.
Phil
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