[TYPO3-doc] A vision for the TYPO3 documentation

[Francois Suter]

Hi again,

I let a bit of time pass to collect more comments and reactions. Thanks 
to all those who took the time to answer.

Here's what I have gathered:

- globally the vision I laid out seems ok
- one worry is to be able to distinguish clearly between document 
categories and ideas have been proposed in that regard. I am well aware 
of the fact and have my own ideas on the subject too. I think which 
idea(s) we finally use are actually implementation details, which 
doesn't mean they are not important. I'll open a separate thread for 
that particular topic.
- the question of documentation "quality" was raised, statuses like 
"released", "reviewed", etc. This is actually the main point I wanted to 
make. What I would like to have is *official* documentation, and by that 
I mean it is approved and reviewed by people like the Doc Team and me, 
as the Core Doc Manager. So while anyone would still be free to write a 
manual, it would certainly not automatically qualify as "official".
- that list of documentation would need to be improved over what we have 
now, so that it is easier to find a manual and know what topics it covers.
- we should also improve the search possibilities (this was discussed 
offline with Steffen Kamper). It is currently not possible to search 
inside a single manual or inside all manuals (but not the rest of 
typo3.org). This will depend strongly on what search technology the new 
typo3.org uses, but I will raise the topic with the people in charge.
- there's a real lack of an on-line easily accessible TypoScript 
reference. The main reproach is that links change all the time when 
manuals are rendered. This is a very valid complaint and is something I 
have been thinking about for a long time, because it is not the only 
problem: there's also the TS reference used by the t3editor, which has 
to be edited manually by the t3editor team, and there's the in-line help 
which is built from the manuals inside TYPO3 by extension tsconfig_help. 
I think the XML file used by the t3editor team should become the 
reference and would certainly make it possible to build the web pages 
some of you dream about. This is outside the scope of this thread and 
I'll open a new one for it.

Thanks again to all for the feedback. Look for the threads that will 
follow up on this one and - if you're motivated by documentation - start 
thinking about which manual you would like to contribute to.

Cheers

-- 

Francois Suter
Cobweb Development Sarl - http://www.cobweb.ch