These crawls are part of an effort to archive pages as they are created and archive the pages that they refer to. That way, as the pages that are referenced are changed or taken from the web, a link to the version that was live when the page was written will be preserved.
Then the Internet Archive hopes that references to these archived pages will be put in place of a link that would be otherwise be broken, or a companion link to allow people to see what was originally intended by a page's authors.
Welcome to the official home of the WordPress documentation team.
This team is responsible for all things documentation, including the Codex (moving to HelpHub), handbooks, developer.wordpress.org, admin help, inline docs, and other general wordsmithing across the WordPress project.
Want to get involved?
We need your help keeping content current with each WordPress release and adding new content and screenshots to:
Project HelpHub is the user documentation base that will sit on WordPress.org/support. It's the companion to Developer's Hub which serves development documentation.
The general guiding philosophy for the design, content creation, and build of the project is – Help users help themselves.
We want users to be able to find answers on WordPress.org before posting on the forums. We want to make documentation more discoverable, through enabling search, visual improvements and concise targeted content.
We've been working on HelpHub for some time now and its possibly the final item that needs completion from the roadmap created by the Docs Team way back in 2013.
What’s the difference?
The biggest change is actually using WordPress to power content!
Shifting away from Codex was a deliberate decision
What we like about the Codex
What we hate about the Codex
Developer issues with the Codex
User issues with the Codex
Codex traffic breakdown
Scribbles the Docs Team did in 2013, suffice to say Codex wasn't enough
Too many pages that deal with the same issue (we have 4 getting started pages!)
Conflation of user and developer content
Content is hard to navigate
Content is way way way way way too verbose
Too much irrelevant content
Codex couldn't be realistically improved in it's functionality to deliver meaningful content
HelpHub aims to curate articles in a more concise way with standardised formatting and screenshots where possible.
Up-to-date screenshots
Consistent formatting, improved readability
Proper editing via WordPress back end & Gutenberg
Better categorisation & discovery
Gutenberg Editing
The possibility to add functionality as need arises
Adding read time to help keep articles concise
Current State
We want to release a minimum viable product, and we have classified it as such below:
MVP – Plenty better than Codex
Better content
Internal search
Improved readability through design and content re-writes
Better article discovery through better categorisation
REST API endpoints
Phase 2 & beyond – Iteration
Phase 2 & beyond will have the team working on the enhancements on top of the basic features. We'll keep iterating to make things more use-able, easier for people to collaborate and of course create better content.
Examples are
WordPress Search -> ElasticSearch
Simple input search -> Auto complete and Suggestions via JS
And more
We'll also work on new features based on understanding how well the basic ones work and what the general end public needs next. Such could be article voting, direct article contribution via Feedback or user guides for example.
Team
Many people came in to help, unfortunately, life happens. We will need some consistent help going forward.
It is also plainly obvious that having an overall project lead isn’t enough to help tackle the pre-launch needs, let alone the post launch ones.
They have already been doing these tasks but it would be great to properly introduce them
Our focus right now is to complete the development work for MVP and also work with the Meta and Support Team to properly setup HelpHub on WordPress.org
We aim to release HelpHub latest by 31st May 2018. We are working however to release it earlier than that.
Progress of Phase 1 (MVP)
Articles are appropriately categorised
Many popular articles were re-written
General WordPress.org styling are being merged in
We're now focusing on the tasks needed to ensure proper integration to be the Hub Page of WordPress.org/support
What do we need?
Developers. Consistent developers who are familiar with WordPress & PHP coding standards and good practices.
Content Migrators and Editors who are familiar with editing in WordPress.
If you would like to join us, you can do so in the following ways
Comment here
Join us at HelpHub meetings Tuesdays at 15:00 UTC in #docs
We have the the staging version of the site up. (It still requires a fair bit of styling fix but the fundamental code to run it is in). It's not the prettiest right now but we're working on it. And we could certainly use your help!.
MVP for content is marked as: better content, internal search, improved readability (design and content wise) and better article discovery (through better categorisation). We also need more content migrated from codex and we need more help with it. If you are interested please reach out for @atachibana on slack and he’ll provide the “how and where”.
Development Updates
We have two options for improving local development of HelpHub with VVV:
Rearrange the Helphub repo to fit into a VVV custom site template, it means mostly moving stuff to a public_html subfolder, and adding a provisioner and logs folder.
Wait for some VVV changes that might arrive in a month or two’s time that make specifying a wp-content folder easier, then update the documentation.
Content status page is updated, you can find it here. Twenty Seventeen article is migrated. Also, there is a new article in review process about password best practices, as explained in track ticket.
Development Updates
Somehow along the way, we lost path to the original plan, which is that HelpHub is a static content part of Support forums. The goal is to drive people to solve their own problems before getting to the forums.
Therefore, home page for HelpHub is actually current home page for support. Articles are going to live under /support so we need to create CPT templates for HelpHub related content. It is agreed for CPT to be under “articles” slug. We need a script for migrating all existing articles on HelpHub to CPT, GitHub issue #153.
Articles should be simpler with a limited, right-side sidebar that showed a few basic things like related articles and such, with meta information at the bottom of the page. In rtl languages, the sidebar would be on the left. We might need custom post template for Guides as they need ToC (this will be marked as Phase 2), which is not always the case with Articles. For Articles, if needed, we might try a different approach with horizontal ToC.
Forums would also show at the bottom of search results, as a last resort if search didn’t help in finding the answer. Or at the bottom of an article, if article didn’t cover the problem.
Next steps
Replace current theme in Github repo with the Support one, @clorith volunteered.
Start tagging Github issues with MVP.
Properly define an MVP on next meeting.
Define a launch date, which will help give the push to everyone working on project to tide it over. End of May is proposed but this really depends on MVP and available people.
AOB
There was also a discussion about how docs team is going to use Gutenberg (the new editor) for the purpose of writing articles/guides and how to include it in our Handbook.
It’s been a while since the last meeting and, therefore, this meeting was more about getting back on track than updates. In general, we need to create a plan with exact goals regarding content, design and functionality defined. With this plan tasks and necessary steps will be more clear.
Content
We don’t have updates on migration state. However, we should consider what content (that is not present in codex) could be useful for today’s end users. One such example is #40237 – Educate users about modern password best-practices.
I’d love to hear some thoughts on this (cc @atachibana).
Design Updates
Home page design is blocked by several questions. These questions should be answered as soon as possible in order to move forward with design and development for home page.
Development Updates
Sidebar navigation is in progress at the moment. We’ll follow design from other .org Handbooks but, for the time being, populating sidebar will be done manually.
It’s been a while since our last meeting, we’ve all been busy and on top of that @kenshino had health issues (hope all is well now!). Let’s see where we stand with HelpHub and try to move forward. Thank you.
Do read the summary and let us know your task updates!
