Documentation Team, second half-year report 2013

Categories: Documentation Created by François Suter
The last news summing up our activities covered the first six months of 2013. Let's then recap what happened in the second semester of last year.

Although we published <link http: forge.typo3.org projects team-docteam wiki the list of meeting>meeting minutes and posted regularly to various mailing lists, it has been a long time since the last official news from the Documentation Team. I'm afraid I'm not quite as motivated as I used to be, which made me less eager to communicate.

In the third quarter our efforts were concentrated on the TYPO3 CMS Core. All system extension manuals were migrated to reStructuredText (reST). A new system extension was developed to view documentation inside the TYPO3 CMS backend. All of this was merged into the upcoming 6.2 version. This also makes the documentation of system extensions finally available online, in the <link http: docs.typo3.org typo3cms extensions manuals on>same place as TER extensions.

In the fourth quarter, the focus was on improving the rendering of extension manuals on docs.typo3.org. All manuals benefit from the proper template, although reST-based manuals benefit from better rendering. PDF rendering is also possible. Many thanks go to Xavier Perseguers for this, who reinforced our team. There is also better integration with the TER, especially in the TER display: documentation links show up correctly in both list and detail view.

Migrating to reST and writing manuals in reST has become easier thanks to Xavier's <link http: typo3.org extensions repository view sphinx of the extension in>sphinx extension. This is worth mentioning here even though it is not an official project of the Documentation Team.

As usual, the Mediawiki engine of wiki.typo3.org received regular attention. Updates were made and some obsolete functions removed.

We also started trying a new contribution process via Github. Few contributions were made this way and we have actually been lagging behind handling those contributions, so this may not be a good solution after all. We will do an assessment later this year.

Looking ahead

We were granted a budget for 2014 dedicated to finishing the work on docs.typo3.org. Although the site is running fine now, there are lots of cleanups and improvements to perform under the hood, as well providing an API to interact with it. Work will start with a code sprint (the first ever from the Documentation Team), which will take place from April 10 to April 12, in Fribourg, Switzerland. We will post further information about this once more details are known.