(Compiled by JoAnna, edited by Darci)

The goal behind holding a documentation sprint was to really dig in and fix up plone.org’s documentation. We have a lot of documents on a lot of topics but it’s a standard complaint that no one can never find anything. After months of reorganizing, talking, and plotting, we decided that our goals for a doc sprint would be to reorganize the plone.org documentation area and deliver the latest release of Plone with up-to-date documentation. As the sprint comes to a close, I’m happy to report we have accomplished our intended goals.

Our team of documentation sprinters in attendance included Aleksander Vladimirskiy, Joel Burton, Steve McMahon, Darci Hanning, Erik Rose, Bob Edmonston, Rob Stephenson, Balazs Ree, Jeff Pittman, Esther Schindler, Nate Aune, JoAnna Springsteen, and Veda Williams, as well as many virtual sprinters. This was possibly the first ever non-virtual documentation sprint. The sprint got off to a fantastic start thanks to all of our wonderful sponsors. Because of their support, we were able to cover a lot of the costs associated with the sprint. Our sponsors helped set a standard of support that I hope only grows from here.

So what exactly did we do while at the “GooglePlex” for a week?

Our biggest task and biggest success was the reorganization and redesign of the front page for plone.org/documentation. Limi joined us for break-out session where it was agreed that we try the card sorting technique to make sense of the 1200 how-tos, tutorials, and manuals currently hosted at plone.org.

Erik Rose and Steve McMahon promptly rose to the challenge and led the way in a massive card sort where we each took turns trying to categorize all the how-tos and tutorials from http://plone.org/documentation. Both Jeff Pittman and Rob Stephenson made major contributions to the process by putting together the initial “clumps”. After three and a half days, we were (and still are!) quite pleased with the categories we came up with.

Veda Williams and Joel Burton collaborated on a new design for http://plone.org/documentation that will be launched soon. Steve and Alex Clark also worked on updating the software for Plone Help Center so that it can support the new design and categorizing of documents based on the final results of the card sort.

On the more “pure” documentation front, Alex Clark, who joined us on Wednesday, took on the challenge of updating the api.plone.org documentation for Plone 2.5.3 with plans to implement the same for Plone 2.1. and Plone 3.0. Steve updated the Archetypes manual as well as worked on a UI tutorial. Alex Vladimirskiy tackled documenting OpenID, the new default roles, and new workflows for the Plone 3.0 release. Bob Edmonston worked on a document that describes how to use macros and metal in plone page templates. Darci Hanning completed the final draft a versioning how-to for Plone 3 as well as provided assistance for plone.org issues and contributed to card sorting. Esther Schindler and Balazs Ree worked on writing up some extremely critical documentation for the KSS product. Joel Burton served as a SME, editor, and cheerleader as well as cranked out a manual on Zope Page Templates. JoAnna worked on a kupu document, contributed to the workflow manual and the doc reorganization. Jeff Pittman and Rob Stephenson began the work of incorporating end user documents from learnplone.org.

These are some substantial contributions to Plone’s documentation offerings that will be visibly noticeable to the Plone community and extremely helpful to those who participate in the IRC chat room. The documentation team sincerely hopes that the efforts from this sprint are helpful to all members of the Plone community.

What’s next?

While we still have a few finishing touches to make, we’re already looking ahead and we want to hear from you — what do you need from your “Plone Documentation” experience? Drop us a line at the Doc Team mailing list and let us know! Better yet, come join us on the “Doc side”!