The todo list for the documentation

Here we present topics to work on for the user documentation.

You can find a detailed list on https://github.com/joomla/documentation/issues. There you can also find discussions about a subject and background information. You can also mark there you are working on a specific article, to avoid someone else working on the same topic.

For the documentation session on JDay USA we will focus on content management tutorials. Here is the todo-list:

Feature / Issue	What is Needed (description in GitHub issue)	Existing documentation (User Guide)
Content Management (CM) Tutorials
6. Pagination and Read More
6.1 Pagination	CM6.1 Pagination #62	Article: Edit - Pagination
7. Publishing and access restrictions
7.4 View Access restrictions	CM7.4 View Access restrictions #65	Article: Access Restriction
7.5 Locking an article	CM7.5 Locking an article #66	Article: Check-in
7.6 Edit permissions for articles	CM7.6 Edit permissions for articles #67	Article: Edit - Permissions
8. URLs
8.1 SEF URLs	CM8.1 SEF URLs #82	SEO: SEF URLs
9. Modules
9.1 Adding text other than in an article	CM9.1 Adding text other than in an article #70	Custom Module
9.2 Module display by menu-item	CM9.2 Module display by menu-item #71	Module Display by Menu Item
10. Menus
10.1 Submenus	CM10.1 Submenus #85	Menus: Submenus
10.2 Split menu	CM10.2 Split menu #86
10.4 Adding another menu	CM10.4 Adding another menu #72	Adding a New Menu
Tags
11.1 Content Tags	CM11.1 Content Tags #68	Content Tags
Metadata
12.1 Article metadata	CM9.1 Article metadata #69	Article: Edit - Metadata

You can find the whole spreadsheet here. During the documentation session on JDay USA you can put your name behind the item you want to work on (to avoid double work).

In the spotlight: content management tutorials

At the moment we'll focus on tutorials about content management. That is the management of the content in articles, menu-items, categories, modules, etcetera, ignoring building and maintaining a site (that's the subject for another series of tutorials).

A series of tutorials that shows beginners how articles, menus and categories play together in Joomla. Targeted at new Joomla users.
In the current user manual those topics are scattered under several headings (getting started, articles, menus). We especially need some articles that show the relation between the several parts. For instance you can set some general values in the articles options, but you can also set those values in the options-tab of an article or of a menu-item. In addition, you can also adjust the settings in the settings of a category.
We are restructuring the content of the manual: now it is mainly an alphabetical listing, but we want to put things that belong together more together. All those things about articles, menu's and categories will be under one heading of Content management.

How those tutorials for content management are built up and what existing user manual articles you can use for it can be found in this spreadsheet (work in progress):
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1oBTz5hIfIJaMo3gcAWJ5oTLx0CadR_rbcKlJYM407kU/edit?usp=sharing

You can find more in all sub-items of this issue: Tutorials about content management. Look for the open items (CM6.1 and higher).

The tutorials that will be made today will first be published in the left side menu on the Tutorials page. There you can see how a tutorial can look like.

About Tutorials

A tutorial is almost never complete. It just shows a way to do something, not all the alternative possibilities to do so.
Main goal is to show some concepts you want to teach. No long explanations. A tutorial is learning by doing.
The tutorial offers a series of steps that the reader can repeat, leading to a reproducable result. The path however is more important than the result.
fixed order:
- Start with an overview of prerequisites: what tutorials must be done before doing this one.
- Then a summary of what this tutorial is about (shortly describing the example).
- Then the steps to follow
- End with a conclusion: summary of the covered concepts.

Custom Fields

Needed:

a tutorial explaning how to use custom fields; now: https://docs-core.sandbox.joomla.org/user-manual/fields/fields-fields-and-field-groups
Of all the articles currently under "fields" there are 4 general articles (fields and field groups, field parameters, multilingual sites, and template overrides). They are on the same level with the 15 types of custom fields and one article about a special custom field: subform. Can you come up with a better structure instead of putting all those articles on the same level? if you need a deeper layer, don't forget the overview page.
a how-to guide about how to repeat custom fields (using a subform).
example of using nested subforms in custom fields (new since 5.2).
a reference (overview) of all custom fields + short description.
tutorial about template overrides. see https://docs-core.sandbox.joomla.org/user-manual/fields/fields-adding-custom-fields-overrides

See the series about custom fields by Marc Dechèvre in the Magazine: