If you attended Codegarden this year you might have noticed that the Umbraco Documentation got a lot of attention. One of the reasons for this is that we here at Umbraco HQ have started to focus more on the community aspect of Umbraco.
Here’s a quick overview of all the CG18 documentation related stuff:
As per tradition, our very own Niels Hartvig kicked off Codegarden with a keynote where he presented all the new and amazing stuff we’ve been working on for the past year. He also introduced two new initiatives: the new PR (Pull Request Team) and The Documentation Curators team ← That’s us!
Me and Jeavon got 5 minutes in the spotlight in front of over 600 Umbraco users to present our work with the Documentation and share with everybody how we are actually working with it.
As I’ve mentioned in my previous blog posts, I had my first ever talk at Codegarden this year: Sofie’s Docs Diary: Origins. During this lightning-talk I shared my story about how it’s been working with the Umbraco Documentation since I started back in August 2017. It was an amazing experience, and even though I was super nervous leading up to it, I’m really glad that I did it 😃
Some of my fellow Documentation Curators also had talks during Codegarden:
Marc did a talk /puppet show together with Lee Kelleher on applying atomic design in Umbraco
Damiaan did a magical talk about integrating external data
On day three of Codegarden the Umbraco Documentation got even more attention, when it earned a spot during the open space sessions. A little over 25 people joined me, Damiaan and Jeavon (oh, andmini-marcemarc) to talk about the Documentation repository, about Our and about how we can improve the documentation going forward.
So, as you see, the Umbraco Documentation got a ton of attention at Codegarden this year. On top of all of that, it was amazing how many people came up to us with feedback - we simply cannot thank you enough!
The open space session was a GREAT success! We got a lot of feedback and a bunch of great suggestion for the Documentation going forward.
Let me try to sum it up for you:
The way the Documentation on Our is right now it can be a bit hard to figure out how to actually modify an article. We can only agree!
We talked about putting a bigger call-to-action button on all the articles on the Documentation to make it more clear how easy it actually is to suggest a change to an article.
It’s only been a few weeks since this was discussed, and guess what? The button is already live on Our! How amazing is that?
One of the bigger topics during Codegarden 18 was Umbraco Headless. A new product like this should of course be accompanied by some documentation about it, right?
Why of course!
That’s also why we merged in documentation about Umbraco Headless the Monday after Codegarden. If you’re interested you can find it right here: Umbraco Headless
How cool is it to have documentation live for a product that’s currently only in test mode?
We talked about a lot of different stuff during the open space; Documentation for Umbraco v8, having a style guide for how to structure and write an article for the documentation, the lack of documentation on Umbraco Forms, etc.
A lot of great feedback, and even though we can’t handle everything all at once, I promise you one thing: We’ve heard you! And we really appreciate all of your opinions and ideas.
Is there something specific you’d like to discuss? Head over to the issue tracker on the documentation repo on GitHub. You might find that someone is already discussing it, and if not, create a new issue.
Right after Codegarden a particular race started: The Typo-fix race 🏁
A short time and a bunch of Pull Requests later, the Umbraco Documentation is now completely free from typos, and I believe someone even did a complete grammar check as well? 🙈
Someone really took my notion about “starting small” serious - I dig it! Keep it coming.
A race gotta have a winner, right? This particular race was a very close one: A BIG congratulations and #H5YR to Anders Bjerner and Chris Houston who've both been doing a tremendous amount of work! 👏
With that said, having a very grammatically correct and typo-free documentation, I’d say we’re now all winners 😉
Now, back to those numbers. How much has actually happened on the documentation repo since Codegarden, and since my last blog post? I’ve put together some numbers for you here:
71 PRs merged since Codegarden! Wow!
That’s just amazing, right? Most of them containing typo fixes, of course 😉
Oh, and the best part - look at the numbers of contributors. That has gone up by 10 people 😮
Thanks to everyone who’s contributed, #H5YR!
That’s all for me for today!
Until next time.
Where to start? When it comes to the Umbraco documentation there’s a lot of places I could choose to start. But then I thought - where can I make the most impact the fastest and easiest? Umbraco Cloud. So that’s what I’ve been tidying and improving recently - and oh boy, looking at it now, the structure is much friendlier and easier to follow (not to toot my own horn too loudly 😉 )