[wp-docs] New to list

Wed Jul 8 17:25:49 UTC 2009

As everyone has said, welcome to the Codex and WordPress Documentation Team.

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.

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.

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.

* 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.

* A powerful Index page can be created from the categories, I hope, making
the process easier. *DO NOT *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.

* 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.

* 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.

* 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.

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.

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!

Lorelle VanFossen

On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 9:59 AM, Will Kemp <Will at swaggie.net> wrote:

> On 07/08/2009 11:17 AM, Jonathon Wardman wrote:
>
>> Will Kemp wrote:
>>
>>> Is there any way to get a complete list of all pages in the codex?
>>>
>>> A comprehensive index of pages would be useful.
>>>
>> http://codex.wordpress.org/Special:AllPages should give you everything.
>>
>
> Thanks. That's interesting.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> I guess wikis aren't designed to be indexed in that way though, are they?
>
> 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.
>
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