With so much happening in the Joomla! Community these days with all these brilliant people working on the new Joomla! Framework Project, and the geniuses adding great new features to the Joomla! CMS, I wanted to take a quick minute and highlight a crucial area of the of the Joomla! Project that everyone can help with, even folks like me who are pretty much useless when it comes to programming!
The Joomla! Documentation is a great resource for thousands of users every month providing resources, documentation, and comprehensive how-to’s for the Joomla! CMS. With the release of Joomla! 1.6 a couple months ago, we’ve been playing catch-up to try to get all of the documentation revised and up to speed for Joomla! 1.6. To be honest, we need your help! Creating or updating Joomla! documentation is easy. If you use Joomla! on a regular basis you can probably find areas to make big improvements right now! So, if you’ve got a moment, or if you’re looking for a place to put your invaluable knowledge of how Joomla! works to good use, this one’s for you!
How to Get Involved
Joomla! Documentation is probably one of the easiest ways to get involved in the Joomla! Project, and, one of the most important. It’s easy because, as a Joomla! user, you can help! It doesn’t take a developer or programmer to update or create documentation. If you use the Joomla! CMS, you are qualified to help us make sure the documentation stays up to date!
There are a couple really easy steps to jumping in and helping out:
- Register as a user in the Documentation Wiki
- Learn the Basics for the Wiki – here’s a quick cheat sheet to cover how to edit a wiki
- Find a page or topic you are familiar with and help make sure it is up to date!
Ways to Help
- Help Screens: One of the valuable features of Joomla! is the built-in documentation for just about every page in the Joomla! Administrator Panel. Most actionable pages contain a handy Help icon in the right corner of the toolbar giving users a detailed look at what that page can do. Unfortunately, with the release of Joomla! 1.6, these Help Screens are behind the times. Many of them reflect the layout and options from a 1.6 Release Candidate with significant changes having taken place between then and now. Updating these is our top priority to help users. Want to help? Editing help screens is easy! Check out our comprehensive list of screens that still need to be reviewed or created, then pick one that you are familiar with and start updating!
- General Documentation: Help Screens, albeit very important, are only a part of the Joomla! Documentation. The general documentation covering every area of the Joomla! CMS is always being updated, revised, or added to. Making sure that every page is informational and helpful, and making sure that everything is kept up-to-date is important for users every day. Find a page that could use some help? Jump In! Looking for something and can’t find it anywhere? Chances are you could add a new page to the documentation for users to reference every day!
The Joomla! Project is moving into a new phase in life with our new release cycle, a more robust community, and a new Framework Project coming out shortly. Helping new and existing Joomla! users navigate our software is more important than ever. We estimate that if everyone here simply took part in creating or updating one page of documentation, we would have almost 35,000 new or updated pages! So make your way over to the documentation site, sign up, and find your topic!