Wiki Wednesday 18 July 2012

[Chris Davenport]

For this week's Wiki Wednesday I'd like to focus some love and attention on our help screens.  Completing the help screens is a huge undertaking and I'm not expecting us to reach completion in a single week.  However, there are some simple, but rather repetitive tasks that can easily be performed by someone with a modest amount of time to spare and getting just these easy tasks done would move the help screens forward a notch.  And who knows, maybe this will inspire someone to go above and beyond the tasks listed here.

Task #9
The idea is that the help screens should all follow the same basic structure as described in our "prototypical" help screen in the help screen style guide: http://docs.joomla.org/Help25:Help_screens_styleguide which also includes some notes on how each section of the help screen should be written.

This task is to simply check that all the help screens follow this same structure.  The help screens are served from the documentation wiki and there is a complete list of all the Joomla 2.5 help screens here: http://docs.joomla.org/Help25:Help_screens.  Click on each of them in turn and compare it with the description given in the style guide.  At this stage all you're looking for is just the presence of the correct headings; don’t worry about the text itself for the moment as that's for a later task. You need to read the instructions in the style guide as some help screens quite legitimately don't have all the headings.  If you find one that is not compliant simply flag it for attention by replying in this thread.  Please also include a short sentence on what needs to be done to bring it into compliance.

That's it; that's all there is to this task.  I reckon someone could very likely complete this in a couple of hours.

Task #10
When a help screen is identified as being non-compliant in this thread, then it clearly needs to be amended to make it compliant.  So this task is to take one of the identified help screens and make just the minimal changes required to bring it into compliance.  All that is required here is that the correct headings are present and in the correct order.  You don't have to add or amend any text at this stage, although if you want to go ahead and do that, then that would be great.

The idea is that the very big job of updating the help screens is being broken down into a series of small steps that anyone can help out with given just a small amount of time to spare.

If you have a suggestion for future Wiki Wednesdays then please drop me an email at chris.d...@joomla.org

Thanks,
Chris.

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Chris Davenport
Joomla Production Leadership Team