The renewed Documentation Team

By: François Suter

Much has happened in recent times on the documentation front. The Documentation Team has also redefined itself. Read on to learn more.

Picture: Rainer Sturm, http://www.pixelio.de/

With the renewed activity on the official documentation came a need to restructure the Documentation Team. Indeed it was pointless - and even confusing - to have a Documentation Team and a separate Official documentation team. The currently active members of both projects (most being the same actually) got together and discussed about the situation. The result is to keep a single Documentation Team but with a shared leadership between Daniel Brüßler and François Suter.

Daniel will lean more towards the wiki and François more towards the official documentation. Furthermore we gave this new team a mission statement, so that its goals would be clear for the community (and for the team itself too). The new mission statement can be found in the wiki page of the Documentation Team.

The main difference with the official documentation is that each manual has its team of dedicated writers and that manuals go through a peer-review process before publication. The official manuals also appear in a separate place on typo3.org. Some other projects besides manuals are also considered as "official documentation" in the sense that they aim to deliver high-quality, verified information. All other documentation projects are part of the Documentation Team. This does not mean that their quality is lower, but just that they may not have been through the same quality assurance process.

There's also a new way to contact the Documentation Team: documentation(at)typo3.org. Any mail sent at this address will automatically enter the OTRS system already used with some other official community addresses. This will make it easy to track requests and also to share their handling between the various members of the team.

We hope you will appreciate the renewed energy and clarity of the TYPO3 Documentation Team. We also hope that it may motivate more people to participate. Documentation is a huge and never-ending task, so we welcome any help we can get. If you are interested you may write at documentation(at)typo3.org or ask for membership in the Documentation Team's Forge project.