MODX Documentation Improvements and Expansion

Suggestion #2:
Quantify change and use that measure in decision support and communication.

Example: Adding a feature where you could click and get an alternate view of the resource tree and see security settings at a glance, and it was an *addition*, it does not change peoples world much at all - all their visual references and landmarks are still there. However, if we are moving or changing screen elements, renaming menu items or what they do when you click, that is a greater impact and it impacts documentation far more.

So having a way of uniformly measuring levels of change and gaging the impact as part of the process; and then communicating those changes. Especially if we are moving things on the screen, relabeling them, actually changing what they do. If it sparks even 5% of the community to initiate or receive a support call, it cost us invisible time/$.

Geeky stuff, but...

FWIW, I have posted version 0.1 of the MODX content management guide, a Microsoft Word document designed to be adapted and handed out to system end-users. This guide is for the people who use MODX Revolution to update and add content on existing websites - not developers or designers, but people with titles like "communications officer" who need to add text and photos and the like.

Details in this thread:
http://forums.modx.com/thread/78207/time-for-a-modx-revolution-guide-manual-for-editors-and-other-end-users?page=2#dis-post-449692

I see this is an old thread, but if there is still a need for help with document writing I'd be willing to help out where I can.

I see gaps in information often and would love to help make the documentation as clear and concise as possible for current and future MODXers.

PM me or hit me up on Twitter if I can help!

I have a suggestion which may significantly improve any MODX documentation located on http://rtfm.modx.com

I think that all articles on rtfm.modx.com should be available for user commenting. Such as documentation on MySQL or PHP ( http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/expressions.html or http://www.php.net/manual/en/language.types.type-juggling.php )

So users can help authors of documentation to improve their articles.

Or may be all documentation should be wikified to gain achievements of this kind. So anybody could improve it.

UPD: I've found the ticket about same problem http://tracker.modx.com/issues/7374 but I have another point of view rather than amdbuilder's: through development process I find a lot of improvements into documentation I can make. But I haven't any tools to publish such kind of improvements to be instantly available to other MODXers.

I have no questions, I have the answers, but there isn't any adequate place to publish them.
"That makes me a sad panda." [ed. note: trianman last edited this post 11 years, 1 month ago.]

+100
Nothing to add.
I often want to add precisions/corrections inside the doc, but I can't...
Too bad...

That was exactly my problem too until I attended MODxpo last fall (Utrecht) and talked to Kevin about that. The simple (but too complicated anyway) solution is to shoot a email at [email protected] and ask for a RTFM login...it was set up quickly and if you have one, you can edit the documentation and also add comments...I actually think this process of creating a RTFM login should be simplified a lot, but for the time being I can at least write down my findings during development...

Quote from: exside at Apr 03, 2013, 05:50 PM

solution is to shoot a email at [email protected] and ask for a RTFM login

Thanks a lot for solution.

But you are right about a necessity of simplifications of this kind.
I think that it should be great if the login to RTFM will be identical with any other *.MODX.com login. And if it will have the same procedure to register.

Hey folks. This week we turned on the new rtfm.modx.com which is built on MODX. At this time we are seeking help in cleaning up pages that have missing content after the very painful extraction of the content from the old Confluence based docs.

Currently your old RTFM login will not work (your modx.com login should work in the next couple of weeks). We would be happy to have anyone who was an editor/contributor with access to rtfm.modx.com previously to help us in this effort. Top priority is to get the first 50 most visited pages back into shape. There are quite a number of pages that are missing or have malformed content. Volunteers would review the pages on both the new docs and the old docs and migrate content over manually to the new docs. Ideally, the process of migration would also include cleaning the markup and stripping any of the Confluence classes and such. The new docs only have a few styles and are mostly based around standard HTML Markup. There is a WYSIWYG editor on the documentation, however, the process will still require people to work with HTML. If this doesn't appeal, don't worry, we'll certainly look for you to help in editing and making content better when we reach that phase.

If you wish to participate in helping clean up the docs, please send me an email to [email protected].

It could be added here that the new docs have a problem with some browsers; it's best viewed with the latest version of Google Chrome, at least until the problem (overflow and scrolling issues) gets fixed.

The Class Reference is seriously messed up right now. The Syntax specification is missing, as are most of the argument descriptions and the return type.

For example: http://rtfm.modx.com/revolution/2.x/developing-in-modx/other-development-resources/class-reference/modx/modx.makeurl

The info is pulled from the PhpDoc comments, but for makeUrl() they look like this:



Only the part between the pre tags is making it into the docs.