Plone Docs Get Monumental Overhaul

A summary of DocSprint Munich.

A lesser known but equally exciting effort behind Plone 5 is an overhaul of Plone documentation.

There will be updates and a new look, which is nice, but hardly exciting.

What’s exciting is documentation that will be versioned, created with a style guide, tailored to user roles, more easily translated, stored in a repository, accessible from the Control Panel, and can automagically update screenshots!

The small but serious and dedicated group behind this project has been methodical in planning and preparing for the next generation of Plone documentation. From the Stroopwafel Sprint in February to last month’s DocSprint Munich, everything has been (re)evaluated and nothing will be left untouched!

Some of the exciting things the sprint team has been working on:

  • Making language translation easy
  • Creating style guides for documentation and for Products
  • Integrating documentation with PLIP process
  • Tailoring documentation to various users roles like deployer, integrator, developer, etc.
  • Building a framework and establishing a repository for creating and maintaining documentation (with automatic screenshots*!) at github.com/plone/documentation and github.com/plone/papyrus

Some of the not-as-exciting but necessary things:

  • Fixing old and broken links on developer.plone.org and plone.org
  • Resolving tickets at collective.developermanual
  • Updating documenation at developer.plone.org
  • Establishing licensing
  • Determining document lifecycle
  • Weeding old documentation

Like the rest of Plone 5, a lot of this work is complete and a lot of it is in progress.

Now you probably want to know when you get to see it. Soon. Very soon!

Update 4/29: It's ready! Visit docs.plone.org

But if you can’t wait, more information about the sprint is available from the DocSprint Munich homepage.

DocSprint Munich was coordinated with the Beer and Wine Sprint and sponsored by the Plone Foundation.

*linked to from Papyrus, under the section "How to Work on a New Document"