2020 - Year of the Docs? 🦆
Despite all the challenges that 2020 has presented to us all, it has been a really great year for the Umbraco Documentation. Besides getting two new people on board the Documentation Curators team, Umbraco HQ launched another project that was fully documented on the release date. Hacktoberfest was once again a great success for the Umbraco docs and finally, 2020 was the year where we started paying some more attention to video material - both on our Youtube channel and on UmbracoTV.
The Curator “Internship”
As of the beginning of March 2020 we, the Documentation Curators, were joined by Busra and Sophie who had applied for the first round of the Curator “Internship” - an initiative we started as an attempt to lower the barrier for joining a community team.
The two have been a really great addition to the team, and they’ve participated in both our bi-weekly team meetings and in our Friday Docsshops (really “just” a workshop 😉). It has been such a great experience having some fresh perspectives and input to the things that we do, and they have even taken on a big task - you might have heard about it: They’re looking into updating and restructuring the entire Getting Started section of the Umbraco Documentation 🥳
They’re closing in on the finish line, and we’re all very excited to share with you all, what they have been working on.
Oh! And we’ll be opening up for new “interns” to join us next year 👏 I’ll give you a few more details about it later in this post, and you can read more about the initiative on our Community Team page.
Documentation and new products
In the summer, we, Umbraco HQ, launched Umbraco Uno - a product aimed at content editors and the popular “No code/low code” approach. In the HQ Documentation team, we took this as an opportunity to add some more documentation for content editors to the otherwise very developer-heavy collection of articles.
Umbraco Uno was launched with a full documentation section with guides, “How-tos”, tips and tricks, and all the information needed to get the best possible start with the product.
Why not go explore the Umbraco Uno Documentation? You might learn a thing or two about the Uno product and about Umbraco in general.
Hacktoberfest
Like we’ve done for the past two years, Umbraco joined Hacktoberfest again this October. And once again, it was a great success. We had a lot of PRs on the Umbraco Documentation repository, and we’re happy to say that the docs have never gotten a better grammar and spelling score 😉
Community Get-together
In the last couple of years, we have invited all members of the Umbraco Community teams to a couple of days here at Umbraco HQ in Odense, Denmark. This year, we decided to move this meetup online instead, which was a great success.
The Documentation Curators trying on various “hats” during a very serious meeting 🤪
So, the Community Virtual Get-together consisted of a couple of days where each community team got to work on various projects and more importantly got the opportunity to meet and talk to the other community teams. The Unicore team was especially popular amongst the other teams this year, due to the upcoming release of Umbraco on .NET Core.
Read Ilhams blog post about the event for more details and highlights.
Video production
One of our goals for this year in the documentation team here at Umbraco HQ has been to increase the production of video material to supplement the written articles on Our. More people have been involved in the process and we’ve managed to publish quite a few new videos on both our Youtube channel and on the UmbracoTV site.
The main focus has been on videos for our newest Cloud products, Umbraco Heartcore and Umbraco Uno, and we’ve also made some more video material for content editors - so videos with little to almost no code. We’re not quite at our goal yet, but 2020 has brought us a lot closer, that’s for sure!
Some other great news on the video side of things is that we’ve started adding subtitles and captions to all newer videos, and will be adding them to every video we publish going forward. We want to make our videos as accessible to all as possible, and captions on videos are an essential part of that.
Looking into 2021 🔮
Now, let’s take a peek into the crystal ball, and see what 2021 has in store for the Umbraco Docs and the two docs team (HQ and community) next year.
So many great things are coming up next year, and I can’t possibly cover it all in this blog post, as I’ve already spent most of my words looking back at what we’re about the wrap-up. I’ll try to make it short and sweet!
The Curator “Internship”
Next year we will be looking for a new set of “interns” to join the Documentation Curators team. We’re expecting that we will officially open for applications in the fall of next year when the other community teams will also be opening up for applications.
Now, that does not mean that you have to wait till fall! If you already now have a burning wish to join the Curator team and work on some Umbraco docs, reach out to us, and I’m sure we can work something out. We’re always open for new-comers 😄
But, what about Sophie and Busra? Will they be staying on the team? Well, we sure hope so! By February, they will have been part of the community team for 1 year, and the plan is to give them until then to decide whether they want to continue on the team. 🤞
Documentation for Umbraco on .NET Core
One of the most fascinating things about next year is the potential release of a new Umbraco version running on the .NET Core framework. This is a huge step for Umbraco, and in order for it to be a big success, we, of course, need it to be properly documented at launch.
Now, this is something that we have already been talking about for months; How do we handle docs for this new major version?
We have ideas, and we have plans. One of them involves creating a new temporary documentation platform and have the documentation for the .NET Core version separate from the current articles for Umbraco 7 and 8. This is quite a big task though, so we’re still in the planning and strategizing phase on that account.
As a starting point, we have created a new UmbracoCMSDocs repository on Github, where we will be working on putting together a structure.
Are you looking to help out with some docs for Umbraco on .NET Core? Then we would love it if you could add it to the new repository. All articles should go into the Articles folder, and all Tutorials should go into the Tutorials folder. Sounds simple enough, right? 😉 We’re going for a very flat structure, in order to remove any confusion and trouble with figuring out, where to place an article in a very large and potentially confusing structure.
You’ll find more details about the workflow and recommended process in the README file on the repository, and if you have any questions at all, please do not hesitate to get in touch with us and we’ll be more than happy to help you out.
And do keep in mind that this new repository is a work in progress, so if you spot some Umbraco 8 articles in there, it’s most likely because we are working on updating some of our current material.
We also want to ensure you that there will be documentation ready for the launch of the next major version of Umbraco 🙏
Aaaall the other exciting stuff…
Okay, so I am seriously running out of words here - time to speed this up a bit:
- Deploy on-prem; another big release that’s coming up next year, and one which we in the documentation team of course also need to be on top of 💪
- Getting Started
- ; Our “interns”, Busra and Sophie, have this year been working on restructuring and improving the Getting Started section of the docs - we’re hoping to publish this and share it with all of you early next year 🙌
- More videos
- ; as it was a goal this year, so will it be a goal for next year to produce even more video material for all of our products! 🎬
- Documentation “Write-athons” (hackathons)
- ; this has been on our list of ideas for a long time, and we’re hoping to kick off the initiative sometime next year ✍
… I personally cannot wait for 2021. So many great things are coming up!
2020 in numbers
For the very final thing (I promise!), we cannot have a blogpost about documentation without also having some numbers. And I thought it was appropriate to do the numbers for all of 2020 🤩
And we thought the number of PRs created last year was a high number 🤯 it’s been increased by 10 PRs this year. OK, that might not sound like a lot, but there’s still a few weeks left and a lot can happen in those weeks! 🎄
As something new this year, I wanted to share with you all the “leaderboard” for the Umbraco Docs repository. It’s exactly what it sounds like - it’s a list of who contributed the most to the Umbraco docs over the past 12 months.
Are you ready?
Here we go:
A BIG shoutout and H5YR to Erik-Jan, Poornima, and Owain for making the top 3 and contributing with a total of 189 PRs 🤩
And of course a big, big thank you and H5YR you rock to everyone who contributed to the documentation in 2020 🙏 We truly appreciate all the work you put into helping us improve the documentation and dedicating your time to give your fellow Umbraco peers an even better experience when learning and working with Umbraco.
Thank you ♥
That’s all for me, and that’s all for the Docs in 2020.
See you next year 🙌
