Would the Documentation Team be interested in us releasing our end-user docs?

Hi Everyone,
The web development agency that I work for uses MODx extensively to develop client sites - and we mostly hand over control of the sites to the customer.

We’ve written a set of reasonably extensive end-user documentation for MODx that we supply to our customers. It’s generic - i.e. MODx (0.9.6) specific but not site specific - and is normally accompanied by template guides in an appendix.

The documentation is written in DocBook format (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DocBook) - which is semantic XML - meaning that you can easily transform it to various output formats. We currently produce, via a tiny script, output in: PDF, Windows Help, and 2 kinds of HTML (single page and indexed) - one of which we link to on the Managers Help page. The PDF version is suitable for printing, and has Table of Contents, Table of Figures, Glossary, Appendix etc... and currently runs to 38 printed pages on A4 paper.

What I’d like to know is: would the MODx documentation team - and the community at large - be interested in us releasing this documentation to the community, under a suitable license (CC, GFDL or something)?

I know everyone’s first reaction to free stuff is to just say yes, but I’m not really interested in just uploading a .zip file to the forums and leaving it at that. I expect that I will have to go through quite a bit of effort to persuade people at work to release this stuff - a process which I haven’t started yet - and I will only be able to persuade them if there is sufficient community interest in collaborating on improving the documentation and maybe folding it into MODx as the ’official’ end-user documentation, at some point.

We will continue to use and improve the documentation based on our customer feedback either way, but working together, using what we’ve done as a starting point, we could all help create better end-user documentation for MODx.

Just to clarify, I’m proposing to release just the Generic MODx manual, not the customer-specific bits - the template guides or cover pages we normally top and tail the manuals with. These wouldn’t be any use to anyone else anyway, but we might be able to release some examples, so people can create their own ones.

I am willing to email documentation team members a copy of the documentation so they can have a look, if they’re interested.

So, the basic question is: is the community interested and are the MODx team interested? Please let me know.

Vote number One from the community for YES PLEASE!
It would be great if you could make this happen.

Yes. 1000%. We seriously need more documentation.

The Docbook format is perfect too! I’d love to see it linked in the manager along with a downloadable PDF. Tell your mates at work we’ll continue working on the MODx core if they’ll keep up with the docs. (Would love to see a copy if you don’t mind.)

So, the basic question is: is the community interested and are the MODx team interested? Please let me know.

Yes.

Definitely, it is a YES

Quote from: dflock at May 01, 2008, 03:08 AM

So, the basic question is: is the community interested and are the MODx team interested? Please let me know.

What!? Documentation contributions? In DocBook format already! (Pardon me while I do a little dance!)

This is absolutely wonderful, and we’ll be happy to discuss accepting this incredible contribution offer. Please PM me or email me to discuss; and I’d love to take a look.

This would be great I am sure that I can find someone here (at work or at the forums) that can translate it into dutch. We made a pfd manual for the client in dutch but most of the time its specific to that website like go here for the gallery pages and go here to add a news item etc.

but a good basis would be excellent I say YES to this.

Oh, that would be brilliant. The current decumentation seems a bit outdated.

More documentation? Yes?

Even if it covers familiar ground the more the merrier. Its kind of like taking a course in college: sometimes reading the main text book is not enough and reading another book (with different presentation) really helps...

Yes, please release it to the community. It would be a great give-back to the free CMS!