Re: [Plone-docs] State of Plone documentation

[Jon S. <jo...@on...>]

=20

> -----Original Message-----
> From: plo...@li...=20
> [mailto:plo...@li...] On Behalf=20
> Of Martin Aspeli
> Sent: Tuesday, March 06, 2007 2:02 PM
> To: plo...@li...
> Subject: Re: [Plone-docs] State of Plone documentation
>=20
> Hi Tomas,
>=20
> > I am researching the state of Plone documentation (end-user=20
> and admin)=20
> > on behalf of CoreNet  <http://www.corenet-int.com>who produce a=20
> > packaged and supported version of Plone under the "SafeShare"=20
> > trademark. We need to provide our customers with updated=20
> documentation=20
> > regardless of whether that documentation gets created=20
> open-source or=20
> > whether we write it ourselves (and possibly contribute to=20
> the community).
> >=20
> > What I see in the mailing list and on Plone.org web is a lot of=20
> > thoughts about how to do and organize things but not so much real=20
> > documentation output. Am I right or have I missed something?
>=20
> The main documentation is at http://plone.org/documentation,=20
> and there is also learnplone.org. However, you are right,=20
> end-user focused documenting is something of a sticking=20
> point. The truth is that we don't have a big team of people=20
> dedicated to this. Most people seem to learn Plone by=20
> themselves, or from books. There are books that cover Plone=20
> from and end-user/light-admin perspective.
>=20
> If you are willing to contribute to such documentation,=20
> though, we'd love to work with you! Did you have anything in mind?
>=20
> > My main question here is:
> > Is there a User Manual and Admin Manual for Plone 3.0 in=20
> existence or=20
> > in preparation that we could use and/or contribute to?
> > If not: What do we do to make it happen?
>=20
> Invest time? :)
>=20
> There is an end user manual at=20
> http://plone.org/documentation/reference.=20
> We should expand that. A lot. However, doing so requires=20
> dedicated people to write it, and maintain it going forward.=20
> So far, our share of such people haven't been as great as=20
> we'd hoped, and the few dedicated inviduals that we do have=20
> with a passion for documentation have tended to be stretched=20
> or busy on other things (e.g documenting more advanced topics).

Plone 3.0 is not-quite-yet-in-beta, which means that features and
functions are still changing quite a bit.  That is the main reason why
you don't see much Plone 3.0 end-user documentation just yet.  (I think
it's just about at the point where one could start to document some of
it!)

So, the release process continues, I am sure that ONE/Northwest and our
fellow contributors to LearnPlone.org will revise, update and write new
end-user oriented content as we are able to.  Our clients will all need
it!  (We'd ultimately like to incorporate LearnPlone.org content back at
Plone.org, and are working on figuring out how best to do that!)

If you are interested in contributing end-user documentation to
LearnPlone, we'd love to have you.  One of the clever bits of LearnPlone
is that the same content can be easily themed so you can deliver a more
branded experience to your customers. (e.g. http://learnplone.onenw.org,
http://learnplone.ifpeople.net)  (It can't, however, turn every
occurrence of "Plone" to "SafeShare" and we do enforce an editorial
guideline of using the stock Plone theme for all of our images and
screencasts ;-)

best,
jon

--------------
Jon Stahl, Program Nanager
ONE/Northwest
www.onenw.org
jo...@on...