• In attendance: @jasonrouet @bouncingsprout @im4th
• Slack archive

The BuddyPress project is very happy to welcome Jason Rouet (@jasonrouet) as our new Documentation leader & Ben Roberts (@bouncingsprout) as a Documentation deputy.

Where are next BuddyPress Docs?

BuddyPress Docs are primarily directly available from the main BuddyPress SVN repository. We’ve created a docs directory which contains 2 sub-directories: 1 for the « developer » documentation & the other for the « user » one.

As each commit on our SVN repository is synced with our GitHub repository, documentation is also available there and we’ll be able to enjoy GitHub browsing service to improve the reading experience.

If GitHub can be intimidating for the uninitiated, using it from our BuddyPress GitHub repository has interesting benefits:

• We don’t need to wait to put up documentation sites: we can start contributing right away (and we actually started!)
• When committing a new Documentation contribution, we can credit authors so that they are rewarded with a lovely BuddyPress contributor badge on their WordPress profile.
• As explained into our last feedback post: having docs directly inside our repository shows we acknowledge Documentation is as important as code.

Once we’ll be satisfied with the docs content, we’ll always be able to use the WordPress handbook plugin to synchronize it with a BuddyPress.org Network site, or better to browse documentation directly from the WordPress dashboard of the site BuddyPress is activated on.

How to contribute to BuddyPress Docs?

The first steps a contributor needs to accomplish once are (everything remains totally free):

1. Create a WordPress.org account & eventually link it to the WordPress.org’s slack to attend Docs Chat.
2. Sign up a GitHub account
3. Fork the BuddyPress GitHub repository into their GitHub repositories

For each contribution & from contributor’s forked repository:

1. Create a new branch (from the command line or directly from GitHub website)
2. Write in Markdown the documentation resource inside the user or developer docs sub-directory (using a text editor or directly from GitHub website) & commit locally the changes.
3. From the created branch, pull a request to the BuddyPress repository to merge the changes (from the command line or directly from GitHub website).
4. Update the branch if a BP Team member asks for changes after their review.
5. Ask @jasonrouet or @bouncingsprout for help if needed!

Once a Pull Request is validated by a member of the BuddyPress team, a BP Core Committer will include the changes to the BuddyPress SVN repository so that they will be synchronized with the BuddyPress GitHub repository (It’s very important PR are not merged from the BuddyPress GitHub repository). At this point, contributors will need to synchronize the main branch of their fork (master) with the BuddyPress GitHub repository. This synchronization can be achieved before building a new contribution (Step 1 of the above list).

Who are the first members of the Documentation team?

During the chat, @bouncingsprout and @im4th (both developers) shared the same intuition: it’s best to have a Documentation leader that is not a developer. Developers are always attracted by code & we need to put the focus on end-users instead. @im4th also shared what he thinks are important tasks the Documentation leader needs to accomplish:

• Lead the BP docs-chat
• Fix priorities
• Review contributions (PR)
• Everything the leader thinks is important to do!

@jasonrouet seemed the best candidate of us 3 to lead the Documentation team. If he felt a bit « trapped » at the beginning, he finally volunteered for the role & @bouncingsprout also did so as a deputy.

@dcavins & @im4th from the development team will also contribute to docs and all code contributors are invited to do so. Contributing to docs is a good way to improve code, for instance @im4th lately opened/patched a few tickets after writing some documentation contributions (See #8932 & #8933).

Support contributors are also strongly encouraged to contribute to docs and attend Docs Chats.

More globally every BP user is very welcome to give a hand, as @jasonrouet said: completely reorganizing the BP Documentation is a huge challenge & we’ll need more motivated people around to progress quickly.

We’ll start us 4 because we absolutely need to improve Documentation and prepare the important change about URL Parsing we’re introducing in BuddyPress 12.0. We are confident new contributors will be attracted by the first improvements we’ll add ourselves.

As @jasonrouet suggested, once there will be more contributors to docs, we’ll be able to share leading tasks between several volunteers.

When do we meet & how regularly?

Here’s @jasonrouet first decision! BuddyPress docs-chat will happen every other Wednesdays at 19:00 UTC.

Next Docs-Chat

It will happen on July 26 at 19:00 UTC in #BuddyPress. If you have specific points or ideas you want to discuss about, don’t hesitate to share them in comments.

#docs-chat, #summary