DrupalCampLondon 2013: Documenting Drupal collaboratively [...] PART 1 - Kristof Van Tomme, Pronovix
Channel: DrupalCamp London
Date: 2013-07-11

DrupalCampLondon 2013: Documenting Drupal collaboratively with interactive tutorials by Kristof Van Tomme from Pronovix.

Note: This is Part 1 of the session. Part 2 can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BlvAO4Yuv1Q

In this presentation I will talk about the new tool we are building to make it possible for anyone to build interactive tutorials for websites. With our tool we believe that we could make it much easier to make, share and collaborate on tutorials; so that it becomes a no-brainer to contribute what we build for ourselves or our customers.
Isn't it weird that the Drupal community doesn't write documentation the way it writes code? We are fairly good at writing patches for each other's modules, extending upon existing code but that just doesn't seem to work for documentation (and no, documented code is not end-user documentation). It is amazing how good our documentation is, but that is the result of the heroic contributions of a few dedicated contributors. Wouldn't it be nice if we could recruit enlightened self-interest to also help make our documentation better? That it becomes a best practice to contribute back because it is expensive not to?
So why is it so hard to collaborate on documentation? Our customers require end-user and technical documentation, couldn't we agree on a standard and start making granular documentation that is reusable by anyone in the community? Why are we still writing our documents in Google Docs, or our word processors doing some occasional copy pasting from previous projects? Why are we still writing tutorials on our personal blogs that are scattered on the web and that get outdated as soon as there is a major module update?
This session will explain how far we are with our project, and how you can start using it to make interactive tutorials for your own projects.