Keeping the Umbraco documentation up to date (Sofie's Docs Diary: Vol. 1)

Keeping it fresh - the why!

Earlier this year my colleague Ilham did a survey on Our.Umbraco.com in relation to her master’s thesis. In this survey she asked the Umbraco community what they’d like to see improved - one of the biggest requests: the Umbraco documentation.

This is one of the reasons why I’ve now started working semi-full time on keeping the Umbraco documentation on Our up-to-date. For those of you who have taken advantage of our documentation before, I guess it’s pretty obvious that there are other reasons for doing this as well, but I’m gonna give you a quick explanation anyways: 

Having the documentation is a great help to everybody working with Umbraco - be it the CMS, Forms, Courier or even Umbraco Cloud. Documentation is basically the written words of how to use and implement different features in Umbraco. Keeping the documentation up-to-date as we continue to develop our products, is thus, a very important task!

We would like to make it as easy and friendly as possible for you to work with Umbraco - a big part of doing that, is having documentation that’s fresh, relevant and understandable.

What I’ve been working on so far:

Since starting working with the documentation a few months ago, I’ve gotten quite a few things done:

• I’ve worked a lot on the Umbraco Cloud section of the documentation:
• The entire Deployment section has gotten a complete make-over
  
  
• I’ve written a brand new step-by-step Migration Guide for people moving existing sites onto our fabulous Umbraco Cloud
  
  
• A face-lift has been given in the form of updated screenshots - and I’ve even added a few awesome gifs
  
• The Troubleshooting section has been updated to now also give instructions on how to resolve various issues regarding Umbraco Deploy.
  
  
• The Umbraco Forms section of the documentation has also gotten a minor make-over with up-to-date screenshots and more awesome gifs in order for it to actually look like the UI you’re experiencing on your own screen.

A little sneak-peek of some of the updates I've been working on. 

Brand new articles

Here’s a list of the things I’ve done and updated so far:

• Power Tools (KUDU)
• Migration Guide
• SMTP setting on Umbraco Cloud
• Duplicate Dictionary Items
• Restore Content
• Content Transfer
• Cloud to Cloud
• Local to Cloud
• Deployment Webhooks
• Frequently asked questions (Sebastiaan actually wrote this!)

Did you know that you can help me help you (and your new colleague) ?  

Umbraco CMS is open-source, and so is our documentation! That’s right! The documentation is on GitHub and you can easily contribute if you feel like something needs to be documented, or if you find articles that are slightly out of date, need new screenshots or better wording.

Just like a code or feature pull request, this type of contribution is highly appreciated by the entire Umbraco community (including Umbraco HQ) as it’s such a massive help to all the users of Umbraco - both current and new ones.

Wanna help out?

I’ll be doing more and more documentation going forward. Remember, Rome wasn’t built in a day 😉. And like an open source software, keeping documentation relevant is kind of like a never ending job which only makes it even more important that we stay up-to-date with what we got so far.

And we’d love your help!

So please, if you have suggestions to where documentation needs improving - or if you need help getting started on improving some of the documentation yourself, I’ll be more than happy to help you out! Write me an email on stk@umbraco.com or find me on Twitter. 

Oh, and this is not the last you’ll hear from “Sofie in the Documentation”;  I’ll keep you updated regularly here on the blog with the things I’m working on so you can go enjoy completely up-to-date learnings.

// Sofie.