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textpattern.com content assessment
As you may or may not know, Phil Wareham is diligently working on a rebuild of textpattern.com. As Phil may tell you, I’ve been pestering him to make sure the effort starts with the content. (Because, as we should all know, design serves the message, not the other way around.)
A long a while ago I started a content audit on .com to have look at it all and see what was good (worth keeping, revising, or moving), bad (worth deleting), or missing (needing written). This is an important first step, because from here a revised site map can be conceived and page tables produced for the new architecture. From there Phil can really put things together.
Phil’s new design, along with Philipp’s new Textpattern branding, will define the look and feel that the other family sites will adopt for consistency and ease of navigation. The wiki will probably be the first to follow suit, then Themes (tag), and then Plugins (resources).
So, exciting stuff. But we need to facilitate the content assessment, and that’s where some help would be nice because I’m spread a little thin these days with the magazine and my own work.
Here is my original assessment spreadsheet. I won’t open it up to public edit because it might invite spam and I just don’t want to fucking deal with that. Have a look at it and if you’d like to help fill in some blanks, email me via my forum email link. Let me know what email address you want to use on google. It will be restricted ‘write’ access, but we’ll work in public ‘read’ mode.
Notice the workbook has two spreadsheets: one is the URL inventory of the entire .com site except FAQs. The other is FAQs alone (a stupid amount). There are different objectives for these sheets. The .com sheet is, of course, a focus on content for the new .com site, as described above. The objective for FAQs is to remove them (at least most of them) from .com by rewriting the information in context to documentation in the user manual. This results with many positives, but I’ll spare you the long list. Hopefully most are self-evident.
For the FAQs sheet specifically… The green columns should be straightforward. For the topic, we want to make clear what the related Txp topics are (however many are relevant). The yellow columns are used to determine where the FAQ information could be written in context to real user documentation. My guess is not much of the information is, so we want to confirm that, and also pinpoint one or more places it should go. The comments column should be used to raise relevant points, clarifications, questions, whatever.
As you can imagine, once we have this sheet completed, it’s a convenient reference to use to know where edits in the wiki need made. Once all the FAQ work is rewritten in context, we can close the spreadsheet down.
Also, once the FAQ audit work is done, we should have an idea of what the top 10-20 FAQs might be, as relevant today, and we’ll highlight those in the Textpattern FAQs page (see wiki home page also), and kill yet another bird with the same stone.
Any questions? Otherwise, who would like to help us get the show on the road? If you’ve ever wondered how to help with user docs, this is your chance, while at the same time facilitating the .com redesign effort. Worthwhile!
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Re: textpattern.com content assessment
Ha-ha! Don’t everybody email me at once.
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Re: textpattern.com content assessment
Not sure if this has been addressed before. Yesterday, I went to the .com site to see which languages TXP offers, and I couldn’t find this information in the 5 minutes I spent on the site. Today I went back and found it quite easily, but for what its worth, this info might need to become a little more prominent in the upcoming re-design.
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