Another six months in the life of the Documentation Team

Categories: Documentation Created by François Suter

Halfway through this year I wrote a summary of the Documentation Team's activities. Here is a one for the second semester of 2011.

The period started really badly with a tragic event: we learned that Daniel Brüßler, long-time Documentation Team Leader, had died in a car accident. Although this was very sad, death is part of life. It cannot be avoided, however it often comes most unexpectedly. Life then goes on, relentlessly. So was it also with the Documentation Team. Daniel's passing away prodded us into a reorganization, a call for more contributors and we came out of this crisis more organized, more numerous and more active than before. I guess this was the best tribute we could pay to Daniel.

A very important event in this semester was the decision to turn away from DocBook and use reStructured Text instead, as the new documentation format. It was not an easy choice to make, but we are convinced that it is for the better. This project is still ongoing and will hopefully come to fruition in the first half of 2012.

The TYPO3 wiki was upgraded to the latest version of Mediawiki. Most importantly it finally got the long-awaited single sign-on with typo3.org.

The official documentation was kept mostly up to date: the most important reference manuals were updated for TYPO3 4.6 within a reasonable time frame, given our resources. The TCA reference got a life of its own, after being extracted from the Core APIs. The official documentation was also expanded by new manuals: the Getting Started tutorial was finally released and a brand new TYPO3 Security Guide was published. There were also a number of new translations: the Getting Started Tutorial to Japanese, the Installation Guide, the TypoScript in 45 minutes Tutorial, the Frontend Localization Guide, the TSref and the Coding Guidelines to Russian. In 2012 there should be a new templating tutorial, to finally replace the sorely outdated MTB and FTB tutorials.

We are meeting online using the Big Blue Button server on a roughly monthly basis. The minutes of all meetings can be found in the wiki.

We hope you have appreciated all this work. It has been very motivating for us to see so much recent progress.

We keep ourselves pretty busy and can always use new helping hands. If you feel like joining us, drop a mail at <link http: news.typo3.org news article another-six-months-in-the-life-of-the-documentation-team to the documentation>documentation(at)typo3.org!