The Documentation Team has probably never been so active. Reaching the end of the first semester seems like a good point in time for a retrospective.
The move started last year, but the last steps were taken only recently: the official documentation project was merged into the Documentation Team, which was only logical. Everything related to documentation is now clearly under the same umbrella. The Documentation Team has also clearly positioned itself as being central to all TYPO3-related projects and not just dedicated to v4 (even though it is the v5 team who is mostly doing v5-related documentation for now).
The TYPO3 wiki evolved quite a bit, with a major software update and several new features like being able to link to Forge issues with a special tag. Very important and also visible was the implementation of a new skin. This complete overhaul refreshes the look and feel of the wiki and will provide a healthy base for following the design evolutions of typo3.org.
A new web site is available for the TYPO3 et al. API: <link http: api.typo3.org _blank typo3 api reference>api.typo3.org. It provides up to date API reference for all the recent branches of TYPO3 v4 (even the current trunk), FLOW3, Extbase and Fluid (v4 integration). The API reference is built using Doxygen and is refreshed nightly.
The official documentation was actively updated following the release of TYPO3 4.5. This is a huge task and some manuals are still outdated but many of the most important ones are now up to date, like the TSref and the TSconfig reference. The Installation guide is also up to date. The Getting Started tutorial is almost ready, it just lacks a few update and a review. A new template was also introduced for the official documentation.
A large translation effort was started, but faltered mostly due to a lack of coordination. When I called out for translators quite a few people answered, but we had no proper structure in place and no organization to follow up on the translators' work. Still several TYPO3 manuals were translated to Russian, which is a very welcome result.
At the same time serious work has started on migrating the official documentation to DocBook. Strictly speaking the project is behind schedule, but it's an ambitious and it's not dying down. Progress is steady. A lot of effort is currently being invested in this area. Among the points being discussed, worked on or already settled are the structure of the manuals itself (and hence the choice of DocBook tags actually used), the rendering process and the look and feel of the rendered manuals, the new workflows, the migration of the existing manuals and much more.
Warm thanks to all those involved, listed below in alphabetical order (if you're missing, just tell me, I'll add your name):
- Andrey Aksenov
- Michael Bakonyi
- Daniel Brüßler
- Philipp Gampe
- Sabine Huber
- Susanne Moog
- Thomas Schraitle
- Christopher Stelmaszyk
- François Suter
- Fabien Udriot
If you have an interest in any of the topics mentioned above, you're very welcome to join the crew. There can't be too many of us!