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I challenged the community a while ago. If we would hit 200 documentation bugs in the tracker, I would spend two full days working on closing as many as I could. Even though it received some good response and the amount of bug reports went up quite a bit, we still didn't hit 200 yet. But that's okay, cause now we have even better initiative: Documentation Friday.

Meet Scott Borys.

Scott Borys, Gobi Desert Photo © 2010 Mike Buchinski

Scott Borys is many things. He's a web developer, hitchhiker, blogger and (even though I never met him in person) I'm pretty sure he's a genuine nice guy, too. 

He just happens to build sites in MODX, and has recently single-handedly created a new recurring initiative causing all sorts of uproar in the MODX Community. The good kind of uproar, that is. The kind of uproar that impacts people's experience with the MODX system, most likely without them realizing it!

Introducing Documentation Friday

Take one avid tweeter, who goes in and fixes documentation issues, while live tweeting the progress and involving members of the community in doing so. That about summarizes what Documentation Friday is. It's a continuous effort to improve the documentation based on bug reports and new tutorials about specific subjects.

Like last week, it usually starts with something like this:

And ends up with some very important updates to the MODX RTFM.

One very interesting side effect that Scott mentioned to me on Skype some time ago (and which I can attest to myself as well), is how writing documentation is a great way to learn and to be sure the information you need is available for reference. Win-win-win!

It's been phenomenal for increasing my working knowledge of MODX. It also makes me happy whenever I need to check something that I *know* is in the documentation because I wrote it.

— Scott Borys, September 28th, 2012

Join the movement!

I've seen various people in the community hitchhiking along with Scott on this amazing initiative (see what I did there?), and I'm hoping that we can kick this into gear and make this a real weekly thing that we as a community help out with. It would be awesome if everyone would hop on board and start fixing things, but even if you just report issues with the documentation so the editors know what to do, that would be fantastic!

So yes, I am going to sunset my Community Challenge in favor of #documentationfriday, in trying to get at least an hour of documentation work in every Friday. Or at least a #catchupsunday. 

Scott; thank you so much for doing this and being such an amazing part of the MODX community. I hope this initiative stays around a long time! Oh, and if you ever end up hitchhiking and couchsurfing in The Netherlands, just give me a call: you're very welcome to stay here for a while. (I know you wouldn't mind me staying at your place either!)

Argnist

Many of articles http://rtfm.modx.com/... have links to old API site.

Mark Hamstra

Hi Argnist!

Can you file that in the tracker instead of as a comment? :) http://tracker.modx.com/projects/docs/issues

Argnist

I hope I did right way http://tracker.modx.com/issues/8979

By the way, my extra StaticSaver haven't approved yet, but I uploaded it ~2 weeks ago. Do you know why it can be so long?

Mark Hamstra

That's perfect, thanks.

It looks like your extra is still in the queue and that there's a bit of a backlog, probably due to the launch of MODX Cloud. It'll be reviewed ASAP, appreciate your patience :)

JP DeVries

Said it before but I'll say it again, one of my favorite things about MODX is that it doesn't pretend it's weaknesses and shortcomings don't exists.
I started using MODX at 2.0.8 (somewhat of a newb) but documentation has come leaps and bounds since then.
This is great initiative that will shave hair-pulling worldwide!

Mark

Sounds good. Is it possible to get an RTFM-account, so we can help improve the documentation?

Mark Hamstra

Yes! Just email support@modx.com with your username and they can set you up :)

Comments are closed :(

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