TYPO3 Wiki (2004–2021)—Long Live the Documentation

Categories: Community, TYPO3 CMS, Documentation Created by Susi Moog
The TYPO3 Documentation Team is continuously working on improving the TYPO3 documentation—keeping it up to date, finding new and better ways to document and—equally important—removing outdated information.

During the last few years, a recurring topic has been the content of wiki.typo3.org—mainly because it was less and less used and growing more outdated due to missing review procedures and a bigger focus on the official documentation. 

When this years’ budget application process started, a special interest group was formed to integrate the wiki information that was still used and to disable and remove the wiki in favour of the official documentation. The members of the TYPO3 association decided to grant us that budget and we started our work.

Content Analysis and Migration

To get an overview of the content in question we used analytics data from the full last year and generated a list of pages with five or more views. Step by step, we checked and reviewed all pages and migrated anything that should be part of the official documentation as it is still valid and could help someone. We did not migrate content related to past events, teams that are not in existence anymore, code examples that only work in TYPO3 4.5 or older and extension related content. Everything else has been added to the documentation and redirects were created to the new home of that content.

TYPO3 Core Exception Handling

The wiki was not only used as a source of general documentation but also as a target for additional information on TYPO3 Core exceptions. To allow the same functionality in line with the normal documentation editing process, a small app has been written. The app knows about all exception codes that are or have been used in the TYPO3 Core. On calling a page for an exception that does not have additional information yet, the app offers the creation of a basic template page that the user can fill in to help the next one encountering an exception.

The process is the same as in other areas of the documentation: A Github pull request is created and the content is reviewed by the documentation team. With this review process, we hope to improve the quality of the exception information. All old exception information pages have been migrated, reformatted and undergone a basic quality review.

Next Steps

The wiki is already in read-only mode to avoid new content being added. Redirects have been created for migrated content, all supported core versions have been updated to reflect the new documentation links and all related pull requests have been merged. Now it’s time to say goodbye to the wiki—we will keep it online for a few more weeks, so if you want to take a nostalgic look into the past, check out the bug auction in 2010 or remember when we dropped PHP4 support with TYPO3 4.2. So long, and thanks for all the fish.

Thank You

A special thank you goes out to Christopher S. who took care of the wiki for many, many years. 

Dates and Stats

Dates

  • Concept start: 23 October 2020
  • Budget idea proposal: 30 October 2020
  • Conceptioning meeting: 25 November 2020
  • Concept end: 25 November 2020
  • Budget idea approval: 15 January 2021
  • Kickoff meeting: 28 January 2021
  • Start working: 28 January 2021
  • End working: 15 March 2021

People

  • People mainly involved:
    • Susi Moog
    • Lina Wolf
    • Sybille Peters
    • Martin Bless
    • Alexander Nitsche
  • People supporting:
    • Christopher S.
    •  Simon Gilli
    • Andri Steiner
    • Benni Mack
    • Christian Kuhn
    • Anja Leichsenring
    • David Bruchmann
    • Stephan Großberndt
    • Christoph Lehmann

Statistics

  • Wiki articles migrated: 193
  • Exception pages migrated: 320
  • Technologies:
    • Symfony
    • Pandoc
    • GitHub API
    • GitHub Actions

References

Additional contributors for this article
  • Content Publisher : Mathias Bolt Lesniak