As everyone has said, welcome to the Codex and WordPress Documentation Team.<br><br>Be sure and check out the guidelines for editing and working with the Codex under the Community Portal. These will help you figure out how it all works.<br>
<br>I've been working on indexing and building a new table of contents for a while, unfortunately, there is a LOT of clean up involved in the process, as you noted on the AllPages results. I've been cleaning as I go, but it's incredibly time consuming.<br>
<br>Here is my recommendation if you would like to help me build a better functioning index pages, from which we can then work on the table of contents. The process needs to start with Categories, not just specific pages.<br>
<br>* Ensure EVERY page on the Codex has the proper Category at the bottom of each page. A page can be in more than one category, but we have to be REALLY specific about categorizing the documents. A document on Plugins should go in the Plugins category, but if it is really basic, it should also go in WordPress Lessons, but if complicated and very "developer" then it also needs a cross reference in the Developer category, right? It's a tough call sometimes but think about how the user will hunt for the information and sort accordingly. <br>
<br>* A powerful Index page can be created from the categories, I hope, making the process easier. <b>DO NOT </b>try to create a "static" list of pages as an index page as that will be a tedious and painful page to keep updated. Hasn't MediaWiki comes up with tags yet? :D That would be the simplest way to create an automatic Index page based upon the keywords in the document. <br>
<br>* Foreign Language articles - We need to put the articles in different languages into their own language specific categories. That will help get those articles into their own grouping, and help us get that information to the people who need it. Check the categorization and language guidelines for how to categorized those. Let's get them out of the English categories, if they are in them currently. This will also help us know which pages have been translated and which need to be translated, helping the polyglots team.<br>
<br>* There are a LOT of unfinished documents on the Codex, including ones that need updating for the various versions. If the document is intensely version specific, it needs to be categorized per version number with a note at the top that the document only applies to that specific version - or updated or removed. If you find a document in question on this and it isn't clear, post it to this list and I or others on the team will make a command decision. In general, my vote is for any information older than WordPress 2.6 be marked as deprecated or out-of-date. Unfortunately, there are still plenty using that version and older, though many in the WordPress Community are campaigning hard for updates.<br>
<br>* I've been on and of researching how to automatically update Table of Contents pages via categories with MediaWiki. Anyone found anything on that yet? It is so simple, in many ways, but I haven't found any way to do that. If we can find a way to pull the information from the database base upon Categories, then keeping a topic specific table of contents would be so much easier.<br>
<br>I'd also like to note that while Matt and others are working on the WordPress Handbook using Subversion, that is a different subject, though it is totally based upon the Codex content and guides. The documents in the Handbook will be technically specific and stripped down to how WordPress works, not offering indepth guides, as the Codex does. I'd love to see more guides in the Codex, giving people more detailed, step by step instructions, with video or audio files accompanying them. I'm working on my schedule so we can do a full campaign on that soon, just to give you all a heads up. <br>
<br>Thanks again for pitching in, and I hope everyone can jump into a specific section to start adding and updating those categories so we can make the process of updating the table of contents and creating a core index page much easier!<br>
<br clear="all">Lorelle VanFossen<br>
<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 9:59 AM, Will Kemp <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:Will@swaggie.net">Will@swaggie.net</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<div class="im">On 07/08/2009 11:17 AM, Jonathon Wardman wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Will Kemp wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Is there any way to get a complete list of all pages in the codex?<br>
<br>
A comprehensive index of pages would be useful.<br>
</blockquote>
<a href="http://codex.wordpress.org/Special:AllPages" target="_blank">http://codex.wordpress.org/Special:AllPages</a> should give you everything.<br>
</blockquote>
<br></div>
Thanks. That's interesting.<br>
<br>
But it's not really particularly useful, is it? There's all sorts in there - chucked in together in a mish-mash of different languages and different types of pages.<br>
<br>
The more i think about it, the more i think that a complete, browsable index of all pages would be useful for a documentation system like this. Actually, i'd say it's essential - and the lack of it is a contributing factor to why it's so hard to find anything in the codex.<br>
<br>
I guess wikis aren't designed to be indexed in that way though, are they?<br>
<br>
It would be nice to work out a way to get a meaningful dynamic index of pages. Something that doesn't rely on people adding pages to it manually. There's so much good documentation buried in the codex it's a shame that some of it is so hard to find.<div>
<div></div><div class="h5"><br>
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