Sofie’s Docs Diary Vol. 21 - The Summer of Documentation

Summer is almost coming to an end. A summer that has been slightly different than what most people are used to. With that said, it turns out that a lot of you guys took some (a lot!) time over the summer to help out with the Umbraco Documentation 🙏

When I came back after 2 weeks of vacation, my inbox was loaded with new PRs, Issues, and general activity on the Umbraco Documentation repository. What a great way to kick-start work again, going through all your amazing work - very inspiring and a very effective way to get back in the game.

Thanks for all the work you put into helping us keep the Umbraco Documentation up to date! 🙏 #H5YR

Now, first up, I  want to give you an update on what’s going on with the Documentation Curators. 

Curator “Internship” - Extended Edition

Earlier this year, we introduced a new concept on the Documentation community team, or Documentation Curators as we like to call ourselves. This new concept we decided to call the Curator “Internship” and was a way for us to introduce new people to curating and managing the documentation repository and work with documentation in general.

After a short application process, Sophie Neale and Busra Parnell agreed to join us for 6 months helping out with various projects around the Umbraco Documentation. It has been a great success so far, and since the 6 months are almost up, I wanted to share some news with you all.

We’re happy to announce that both Sophie and Busra are staying on as “Curator Interns” for another 6 months 👏

Due to the fact that the Corona pandemic hit the world shortly after they joined the team and that this highly affected how we could work together, we have decided to extend their “internship”. That way, they can get a chance to complete the projects they’ve been helping out with and get a fair shot at being a Documentation Curator “Intern”.

So, with that, for those of you who were hoping to get a chance on the Curator “Internship” - I hope you can wait a little longer 😉 We expect to open applications again in February 2021 - more info will follow as we get closer. 

Making it easier to “Get Started” with Umbraco

Remember how I in my last Docs Diary/update listed a set of projects that we’re working on in the Documentation team?

One of these projects is improving the structure of the “Getting Started” section in the Umbraco Documentation. It’s a big project with a lot of parts that need to come together, and something that Sophie and Busra have done a really great job with so far.

Here they are, to give you an overview of the progress:

We needed to establish the entry points for each of the different personas. What would a Developer, a Content Editor or perhaps a Frontender expect to find in a “Getting Started” section? Where would someone on their skill level go, to get the best possible start with Umbraco? Are these persona titles even the correct titles to use for a global audience? 

These are just some of the few things to consider!

We quickly understood that there could be a lot of crossover in content between our personas, and this highlighted that the structure of this information needs to be flexible so that it can be navigated easily.

To gain momentum on this we have decided to expand on our time together; as well as our fortnightly meetings we have arranged to meet on alternate Fridays as workshop mornings to really focus on the detail now we have the structure, and the introductions started.

I’m SO happy that we are able to spend more time with the fabulous team working on this! I can’t wait to have it ready for you all to see! 

Even though all questions above bring even more questions for us to work on for an almost perfect structure of how to get started with Umbraco whoever you are, I personally enjoy “workshop” mornings as they are super productive, so much fun and really fascinating to hear different opinions and compromise in one!

In these crazy times of COVID-19, we are all working to make things easier for you all. I’m extremely lucky to be a part of an amazing team and work along with them! Let’s keep up with the friendly spirit and #h5yr!!

Umbraco Heartcore: GraphQL

A couple of weeks back we released GraphQL for Umbraco Heartcore - a new and long-awaited update for the headless product. The release also included some extra features for the Umbraco and Cloud part of the product.

Along with the release, we published a bunch of new articles on the Umbraco Documentation. You can find articles that give you all the details and information you need to know in order to get started with GraphQL on your Umbraco Heartcore project.

We have also added a brand new Tutorials section to the Umbraco Heartcore documentation. So far, we’ve added an extensive guide on how you can setup a Heartcore project and then use the GraphQL API to query all the data. 

The GraphQL update to Heartcore also comes with a “GraphQL Playground”. It is an interface in the Umbraco Backoffice that lets you safely test out various queries on your data, before using them in production. And yes, we have of course also written an article on how to reap all the benefits of this playground.

More video material

Yes, you read that right! In the HDTV team, which is the Umbraco HQ based documentation and TV team, we’ve started to amp up the volume of video and TV material that’s being produced. 

We have so many ideas and videos we want to create and publish, which can, at times, be a bit overwhelming. So we’re trying to focus on specific areas where we feel we can provide the most value.

Here’s a quick recap on what we’re currently focusing on.

Umbraco 8

Yes, it’s been some time since the latest major version of Umbraco was released. Since then we’ve published a total of 4 video chapters on UmbracoTV along with a series of shorter videos on our Youtube channel.

We want to make new versions of most of the Umbraco 7 chapters already on UmbracoTV; we have a plan, and we expect to publish a lot more before the end of this year, so stay tuned!

Umbraco Heartcore

Over the summer we’ve been producing videos for Umbraco Heartcore leading up to the release of the GraphQL API. Some have already been published on our Umbraco HQ Youtube channel, and we have even more videos in the pipeline for our headless product.

Umbraco Uno

Our newest and more editor-oriented product, Umbraco Uno, was released with close to 200 documentation articles, but no videos - why is that? We wanted to wait until the release of the Block Editor, which will add a lot more value to Umbraco Uno and the whole experience of building websites using the product. 

With this release, we will also start to produce video material to both show off the product and show you how to work with it and reap the full potential of the many features and widgets that Umbraco Uno ships with.

Keep an eye on our Road Map and our blog for news on this new and very exciting release 🤩

First “Preptember”, then Hacktoberfest

So many festivals and conferences have been cancelled this year, but it has been wonderful to see many of the events going virtual instead.

Another event that’s actually always primarily a virtual thing is the fest that’s coming up in October. You know, the one where we spend an entire month celebrating open-source projects, contributions and contributors? I’m of course talking about Hacktoberfest 🤩 - as always, you get a free T-shirt and a bunch of stickers for making a number of contributions to any open source projects. Oh, and I read that this year, you can go the eco-friendly route and choose to “plant a tree” instead of the T-shirt - which I’m sure many of already have way too many of 😉 What a wonderful initiative! 💚

Here in Umbraco, we have already started the preparations, and we will make sure to share with you our plans as October gets closer.

Check out our post-Hacktoberfest blog post from last year, while you wait. I’m sure it’ll spark a lot of inspiration and even more excitement for this year’s celebrations!

Will you also be using Preptember to prepare for Hacktoberfest? 😎

// Sofie