Reply To: Documentation and navigation
Cool, thanks for kicking this off 🙂
Lets start with the layout structure and a “Table of Contents”, I added these recently and these are a good place to start and closely match not just the BuddyPress Codex layout guides but also much of WordPress also (Links to these below).
Getting Started, Theme Development ,Plugin Development, Participate & Contribute and Developer Resources
The Codex is now fully setup with an ‘Automated Table of Contents’ sidebar, see this section on how to acheive this, also the “breadcrumb” will also ‘sync’ up with this table of contents structure.
For now ignore the ‘related posts’, these should also update based on the table of contents plus we are going to move the functions from their current location in the codex, I’ll detail those plans later.
Links to topics on the forums for each section/page of the codex is a great idea, we can do this fairly easily. 🙂
The ‘About’ page is part of the blog, the categories are the categories of the blog posts on the site and this is an automatically generated list, same with tags. Also many of the visible (and there are many not visible) of links from the ‘About’ page is from before we had the codex setup, thus much of the content throughout those links is either duplicated or redundant. A third set of duplicated content is our Trac home page https://bbpress.trac.wordpress.org that we need to redo and sync up with the same content (or at least links) to the correct content on the bbPress codex. A fourth location will be the actual source code of bbPress which primarily is on the plugin homepage https://wordpress.org/plugins/bbpress/. The fifth source would be basically identical to the fourth though is contained in a separate file and that will be for the plugin homepage on GitHub https://github.com/bbpress/bbpress.
BuddyPress has a Google Docs “Table of Contents” here and I have just forked and edited that spreadsheet for us here on bbPress. I have set the permissions so anyone with this link can edit the spreadsheet, with some luck it won’t be vandalised, if this happens we can change this setting to “edit only” for verified editors.
Before we change any of the existing URL’s for documents in the codex (e.g. Moving the FAQ into the “Getting Started” section) we will need to make some redirects behind the scenes so existing links will be forwarded to the new links.
A good place to start would be extracting the sections from the awesome guides Robin has already contributed to build up our “Table of Contents” and once we are happy with what we have for starters in the “Table of Contents” we can then start updating the actual codex pages.
A few references where we can reuse content and build up our table of contents can be found throughout existing WordPress and BuddyPress projects:
https://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/
https://make.wordpress.org/support/handbook/
https://make.wordpress.org/docs/tag/handbooks/
