This week, at DrupalCon Barcelona 2024, Drupal project founder Dries Buytaert announced a new sponsorship program for Drupal CMS documentation. Drupal CMS is the official name for Drupal Starshot, a new no-code CMS product for non-technical users being built on top of Drupal core.
At Drupalize.Me, we’ve been talking with Dries and folks at the Drupal Association about how we can contribute high quality documentation for Drupal CMS. To that end, we provided some example tutorials for the Events feature in Drupal CMS that were highlighted in Dries’ demo of Drupal CMS.
What’s the plan for Drupal CMS documentation?
The plan for Drupal CMS documentation is emerging. We believe Drupal CMS documentation should be a highly polished and organized user guide for end-users of Drupal CMS. And that it should be funded. Why?
Documentation for Drupal CMS is currently estimated to be comprised of 30 sections of content. Each section would likely contain 3-5 pages of documentation. This is a huge amount of work that would require experience, expertise, and dedicated time to complete.
Each page of documentation would be either a concept or task tutorial.
Concepts
- Illuminate a specific topic with background knowledge, term definitions, and examples.
- Provide an overview of the use cases for a feature, helping the learner envision how they might solve their own problems.
- Discuss what tacos are, rather than a step-by-step recipe for how to make a taco.
Tasks/Tutorials
- Provide step-by-step instructions on how to complete a specific task.
- Learning-oriented, especially learning by doing.
- Focus on learning how rather than learning what.
- Help a learner understand how to accomplish a task, and gain confidence in applying the skills to their own specific use case.
You can see this type of organization at work in the Drupal User Guide, a community project, also mirrored on Drupalize.Me, which we helped create and continue to maintain:
Drupal Module Developer Guide which we published on Drupalize.Me earlier this year. Here’s an example of the tutorial types in one of the chapters:
contact Lenny Moskalyk at the Drupal Association.
Watch the Driesnote to learn more
To lean more about Drupal CMS and this sponsorship opportunity, watch the livestream of the Driesnote on the Drupal Association’s YouTube channel.
