Textpattern CMS

#1 2011-05-23 09:29:24

Bloke

Developer

From: Leeds, UK

Registered: 2006-01-29

Posts: 11,820

Website GitHub

[wiki] The admin-side documentation

I know this has been touched upon many times before, but the documentation of the admin side is rather unwieldy. Answers to questions like this should be easy to find, without wading through thousands of words (and it shouldn’t be in an FAQ either!)

I took a look at the Write page. The wiki system itself complains that the page is >30kb and should be split into parts: I agree. The question is, how best to do it?

Anyone who’s read my plugin docs knows I’m not the best person for this task, but I’m willing to help out with some organisational aspects and prose if someone with a clearer idea of how best to structure it could supply some nudges first.

The “obvious” (not necessarily correct) approach would be to split the article into the following 4 parts:

1. An overview, perhaps with the panel screenshot highlighting the 3 main areas, and a brief list of things you can do in each panel so you’d know which one to look in (= which of the following 3 links to click) to perform a particular task
2. “Article options” (currently the left panel) would describe in more detail what you can do there
3. “Main content” — title /excerpt / body description; maybe with links to documentation on how these factor into the TXP article flow (default Form?)
4. “Publishing controls” (currently the right panel) would wax lyrical about what you can do over there

I’m sure there are myriad other ways to organise this so that it presents a useful introduction and brief reference guide for people seeking quick answers to “what the heck is a custom field?” or “how do I change the date of an article?”, and also serve the needs of those that require a little more detail to complete a particular task.

Part of this discussion should also cover the desired URLs, e.g. ?title=Write for the main panel overview, ?title=Write_options for the left panel, etc.

Any takers?

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#2 2011-06-11 13:23:29

Destry

Member

From: Haut-Rhin

Registered: 2004-08-04

Posts: 4,912

Website

Re: [wiki] The admin-side documentation

Yeah, good call.

There’s so much to work on, and for me it’s always a question of time because I’ve been pretty busy with other things.

I’ll keep it on the radar, Stef.