[Owncloud] Call for Documentation Volunteers! (was Re: ownCloud book)

[Daniel Molkentin]

Hi,

On 28.11.2012, at 13:59, Frank Karlitschek wrote:
> we got the second question from a book publisher for an ownCloud book.
> Is someone in the community interested in writing a book?  ;-)

Having been there before *):

* ownCloud is currently developing quite rapidly. If you want a hard-copy book, plan one for ownCloud 5, do not bother with 4.5
* at the same time, if we start a community effort to build a book (everyone is of course free to write a book alone and behind locked bars, but that requires a _lot_ of time and knowledge), skipping 4.5 would be king of sad, because currently our documentation is a bit... lacking.

That's why, at the meeting in Berlin, we created a documentation repository and a doc directory as part of the ownCloud desktop client, so we are currently having 4 manuals:

 - one targeted at admins
 - one for users
 - one for developers hacking on (i.e. core) and for (i.e. apps) ownCloud
 - one for the desktop client (to be shipped with it)

The results are then pushed to http://doc.owncloud.com/ after every commit (with a latency of about 5-10 minutes, this could be reduced furth). We are using Sphinx (http://sphinx-doc.org/) with reStructuredText markup, which can be previewed and edited live in GitHub. Sphinx has been used to typeset books before, and can be used publish in a wide range of formats, from HTML and ebooks to PDF and PostScript, or even Windows Compiled Help (CHM).

However, what our users need right now, is good, up-to-date and reliable documentation for 4.5. That's why there is a master and a stable45 branch. Documentation applicable to both 4.5 and 5.0 should go to the 4.5 branch, things only applicable to 5.0 will only go to master.

All manuals are CC-licensed. Once these manuals are in good shape, it's easy to derive books from them.

So if you want to lend a helping hand, speak up! Bernhard is already doing the majority work on the dev manual and we have two Goole CodeIn jobs open related to moving the Wordpress-based documentation over. However there is still enough to do, so can always use helping hands, especially for the User and Admin manuals and for the Client.

Cheers,
  Daniel

*) Disclaimer: I've done book-writing before, and I have done book layouting and e-book publishing.

--
www.owncloud.com - Your Data, Your Cloud, Your Way!

ownCloud GmbH, GF: Markus Rex, Holger Dyroff
Schloßäckerstrasse 26a, 90443 Nürnberg, HRB 28050 (AG Nürnberg)

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/owncloud/attachments/20121128/cff1fac7/attachment.html>