Restructuring Documentation for Improved Clarity

:white_check_mark: Update (4 June 2024): The initial work of restructuring documentation topics has been completed, and the new categories are now live with new indexes showing what you will find in them. You can check them out here: Documentation - Discourse Meta - if you notice anything looking incorrect, please post below!

After a thorough review of our current documentation structure, we’re happy to share that we are in the process of improving the categorisation of our documentation to make the topics more organised and focused on the goals our community is aiming to achieve. Our goal is to enhance the clarity and usability of our documentation, making it easier for everyone to find the information they need.

What to Expect

:label: New Categories

Going forward, our documentation will be categorised and tagged based on the action or functionality it describes. The current groupings based on user role will fall away, and we will update all documentation topics to indicate which user role is required to perform the activities it describes.

:eyes: Temporary Visual Changes

During this restructuring, you might notice some sections of our documentation looking a bit out of place or disorganised. Don’t worry! This is only temporary as we work to finalise the new structure.

:white_check_mark: Comprehensive Updates

Once the restructuring is complete, our next step will be to update all documentation topics to align with a new, common style guide. We will also be correcting any inaccuracies that may exist. This will be an ongoing project, with the bulk of the work being done over the next few weeks.

How You Can Help

Your feedback, as always, is invaluable to us. If you come across any issues or have suggestions on how we can further improve our documentation, please don’t hesitate to share your thoughts in site feedback or as a post on this topic.

Thanks for bearing with us as we make these changes!

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Topics about moderation like Discourse Moderation Guide are part of Site Management. Maybe that should be added to the description because as a moderator I wouldn’t look at topics in a category for “site owners and administrators”.

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I made a small tweak to the about text to indicate it is also useful for moderators.

@JammyDodger and/or @hugh may have additional thoughts when they see this later as well.

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I gave it an extra tweak:

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Thanks for highlighting this @Moin!

@JammyDodger Your update looks good to me.

The initial work of restructuring documentation topics has been completed, and the new categories are now live with new indexes showing what you will find in them.

You can check them out here: Documentation - Discourse Meta - if you notice anything looking incorrect, please post below!

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Do you plan to add the new categories to the docs plugin?

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We’re torn between trying life without the docs plugin or not. :slight_smile: For now, I’ve added the new categories into the mix. :+1:

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A post was merged into an existing topic: Better documentation navigation with a new sidebar

May I know how the text of the links to topics in the sidebar when in a subcategory is created? AI?

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Each subcategory has an index topic, for example: Using Discourse Index (these are linked from the description in each subcategory’s header).

The sidebar takes the shortened titles from there to use them instead of the full article titles.

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