Thanks,

dru29 (a newbie)
dru29@drupal.org

Modules should have a user’s manual section. Now modules have the documentation link, which is useless. The maintainer of the manual could be the module developer or someone else. Others could help in writing the manual by simply commenting the manual node. A demo site or at least a captured image(s) of what the module does, would be nice to get the main idea quickly. These could be added by others also.

Themes should have a data sheet (in table form?). Comparison option of selected themes would be nice, but not necessary. At least a large captured image of a theme should be “mandatory”.

These changes would be easy to make.

note: we’ve already sketched up some amends to this, but do let me know if you have any more feedback!

thanks again for your thoughtful feedback.
Leisa

.. Drupal documentation, as it appeared to me, unlike the hype, was / is actually quite useful and structurally nicely laid , only thing people were/are jumping at the forum without really going through the docu.s even minimally –> perhaps a knowledge-base type thing that prompted a relevant link to a relevant pieces from the docu.s before a forum post or issue is submitted could help

.. apart from ‘cardsorting’ and classification or non-classification of things ‘documentaion’ per se can be champion when the actual documentation follows or imbibes the details, including text and static images, describing things to such details that makes drupal books really redundant … till then there will be some or other ‘complaints’ of insufficiency of docu.s

By allowing people who know what they’re looking for to search, we can then give over important pages like the Documentation landing page entirely to supporting newbies.

I’ve also made an allowance for a special type of content, which I’ve called ‘designed content’ which is all about a more linear and structured pathway through content to support people who need this more scaffolded learning style.

so, i can’t help but think, we’re actually on the same page with this.

at any rate – the next iteration is going to be available in a few short hours I believe, so we can have a play with it there and see what we think.

thanks again to everyone for such thoughtful feedback

And while searching is very much a sore spot and desperately needs to be improved, the chief complaint I see when providing support in the forums to real newbies (as opposed to developers who are just new to drupal) is that they simply can’t figure out how to get started. That reflects a complete failure of guided learning that randomly wandering around a wiki will not solve.

Getting started is not done with search– it’s done with guided browsing/reading. How can you search for something when you have no clue what you’re looking for? This is particularly true of drupal where some of the jargon is completely unfamiliar to true newbies.

We, as the knowledgeable community, need to guide real newbies through the topics they need to understand in the order in which they need to understand them. Once they have that basic foundation, THEN they can jump to a wiki style interaction where they will have specific needs they wish to find information on.

Multiple entry points to cater for both the types of user and the types of information. Once ‘in’ the information the navigation is as hierarchical as can be presumed from the current context.

You obviously learned a few things at the Online Help Conference in Edinburgh!!

And, as someone else pointed out, since when were these things EVER either/or discussions? They are always ‘BOTH’.

One good thing, is that Drupal 6’s book module allows you to have multiple books – so once we upgrade Drupal.org, it wouldn’t be much work to split all the ‘top level’ books out in to separate ones to get us started.