{"id":2576,"date":"2012-05-21T13:44:41","date_gmt":"2012-05-21T18:44:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.openstack.org\/blog\/?p=2576"},"modified":"2012-05-21T13:44:41","modified_gmt":"2012-05-21T18:44:41","slug":"starter-docs-and-articles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.openstack.org\/blog\/starter-docs-and-articles\/","title":{"rendered":"Starter docs and articles"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"lead\">I wanted to send a note out to discuss the growth of all the starter docs and &#8220;articles&#8221; on a particular topic. Thanks all who are sending these as links to the mailing list or tweeting &#8217;em. We are listening.<\/p>\n<p>The doc team has been discussing ways to ensure we help people find what they seek while still getting high-quality content into the &#8220;official&#8221; documentation. Here are some ideas. I&#8217;d like to get input from our wider community as well.<\/p>\n<h2>What we&#8217;re doing:<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li>Add a &#8220;Where do I start?&#8221; section to the docs landing page. Let us know what you think of this approach by taking a look at <a href=\"https:\/\/review.openstack.org\/#\/c\/7372\/\">the pending review<\/a>. We discussed quite a bit a more friendly approach to the docs site but I haven&#8217;t identified a web dev and designer to do the re-do, contact me if you&#8217;re interested.<\/li>\n<li>Reach out to writers and where licensing allows and something &#8220;official&#8221; is not already documented, bring the content into the official docs. We&#8217;ve done this a few times now, an example is <a href=\"http:\/\/docs.openstack.org\/trunk\/openstack-compute\/admin\/content\/about-the-dashboard.html#dashboard-custom-brand\">how to custom brand the OpenStack Dashboard<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>Add link to helpful blog entries to a <a href=\"http:\/\/wiki.openstack.org\/BloggersTips \">&#8220;BloggersTips&#8221; wiki page<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>Expand the install\/deploy guide to include more distros so the &#8220;single distro&#8221; guides can standalone. This effort is still <a href=\"https:\/\/review.openstack.org\/#\/c\/7431\/\">a work in progress<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>Hastexo has offered to write a separate high availability (HA) guide, so we won&#8217;t bring in their 12.04 &#8220;all in one&#8221; install guide after all, since the <a href=\"http:\/\/docs.openstack.org\/essex\/openstack-compute\/starter\/content\/\">CSS OSS Starter Guide<\/a> covers a similar scenario.<\/li>\n<li>Remove &#8220;articles&#8221; from RST docs. (<a href=\"https:\/\/review.openstack.org\/#\/c\/6930\/\">Currently nova only<\/a>, in further discussion with the Project Technical Leads, QA and CI team leads.)<\/li>\n<li>Add blog URLs to the Google Custom Search Engine at <a href=\"http:\/\/docs.openstack.org\">http:\/\/docs.openstack.org<\/a>. I took this as an action item from our last doc team meeting.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2>What we&#8217;ve discussed:<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li>Removing redundant docs. At the Design Summit, members of the nova core team asked for removal of &#8220;article&#8221; style RST documents from the nova source repo, creating a more doc-string based <a href=\"http:\/\/nova.openstack.org\">nova.openstack.org<\/a>. Members of the swift core team, when asked, did not want to go to this architecture. I haven&#8217;t specifically asked all the PTLs on this particular item. So there&#8217;s still a potential problem here of consistency, where to write what, and having all the project.openstack.org sites that aren&#8217;t really tied together. I don&#8217;t have a good solution to suggest just yet but know we&#8217;re thinking about this particular problem. One idea was to have devs who want to write compose WordPress &#8220;articles&#8221; and that would aggregate together, but we haven&#8217;t found an ideal implementation (design is fine, working code, not so much).<\/li>\n<li>Setting up a separate WordPress blog for documentation only. Apparently the aggregation tools just don&#8217;t give us all the requirements for version labels, bringing in one blog entry at a time (RSS feeds are needed), and so on.<\/li>\n<li>Setting up a &#8220;support knowledge base&#8221; article site such as <a href=\"http:\/\/support.mozilla.org\">http:\/\/support.mozilla.org<\/a>. We discussed this at the last doc team meeting. It seems to solve a lot of problems we have, but my current thinking (which of course can change) is that a support KB is for troubleshooting articles, while the &#8220;official&#8221; docs should create a happy path. These are two different scenarios, and I&#8217;m pretty sure the docs team cannot take on the support scenario with our current resources. A support knowledge base with translation built-in will go a long way in supporting our growing base, so this is important to me, but not in the Folsom plans currently.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I&#8217;ll follow up with each PTL for the docstring discussion, and welcome all input. Thanks for reading this far, and thanks for the docs. Now get started!<\/p>\n<a title=\"Starting line by Jon_Marshall, on Flickr\" href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/jon_marshall\/260978898\/\"><img loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/farm1.staticflickr.com\/96\/260978898_2b3214c2b4.jpg\" alt=\"Starting line\" width=\"500\" height=\"306\" \/><\/a>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I wanted to send a note out to discuss the growth of all the starter docs and &#8220;articles&#8221; on a particular topic. Thanks all who are sending these as links to the mailing list or tweeting &#8217;em. We are listening. The doc team has been discussing ways to ensure we help people find what they&#8230;  <a href=\"https:\/\/www.openstack.org\/blog\/starter-docs-and-articles\/\" class=\"more-link\" title=\"Read Starter docs and articles\">Read more &raquo;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3,21,5],"tags":[326,325,512,25],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.openstack.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2576"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.openstack.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.openstack.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.openstack.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.openstack.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2576"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.openstack.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2576\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2583,"href":"https:\/\/www.openstack.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2576\/revisions\/2583"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.openstack.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.openstack.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.openstack.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}