Re-energizing Our Documentation and Support Experience

[Jim Campbell]

Hey Adam,

On Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 9:45 AM, Adam Sommer <asommer70 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hey all,
>
> Just wanted to quickly say thank your to Jim and Jono for helping
> to revitalize and inject some energy into Ubuntu Documentation.
>

Thanks for your support.


>
>
>>
>>      * We migrate to Sumo and this be the new help.ubuntu.com. This
>>        would involve a migration process (setting up a test server,
>>        theming it etc ensuring that authentication with Launchpad works
>>        etc).
>>
>
>
> I'm all for migrating to a platform that is more accessible, translatable,
> and reviewable (meaning accurate and up to date).  I'm mostly speaking for
> the Server Guide however, since that has been my area of contribution to the
> Docs Team.
>

During our last meeting we had looked at moving the server guide to
something like docs.openstack.org, and getting that set up for this release
cycle. That has the support of the server team, and is something that would
be doable for this release.

We can also work on getting something like Sumo set up, but we had talked
about having something like that ready for the 12.04 release. This would
give us more time to test it out, decide on on-disk vs. on-web content, and
to get a workflow together for translators.

If we can get it set up before then . . . that would be great, but I'm not
sure how realistic that is given the amount of change involved and the work
required.


>
>
>> Would someone be interested in setting up a Sumo server so we can play
>> with it, add some sample content, and take it from there?
>>
>>
>
> I couldn't seem to find a place to download Sumo?  I guess I'm unclear
> about what Sumo is... from reading the Sumo blog, it seems to be some
> extensions and modifications to TikiWiki
> http://blog.mozilla.com/sumo/2010/02/18/the-bright-future-of-the-sumo-platform/.
>  I've probably missed something and am just being dense though.
>
>

It took me some hunting to find it myself, but the sources are on github:
https://github.com/jsocol/kitsune. The installation instructions are there,
too: https://github.com/jsocol/kitsune/blob/master/docs/installation.rst .
It used to be based on tikiwiki, but they transitioned to something that is
more based on Django.

I chatted a bit with one of the developers on IRC, and one thing to note
about this is that they release weekly. The person I chatted with said that
they have some internal IT documentation for updating the site, but it seems
like we would need some pretty solid support from Canonical IT to base a
help site on something like this.

Also, Mozilla uses it for three different projects - support.mozilla.com,
the support site for thunderbird, and they are forking it to host their MDN
content. Outside of that, though, there aren't any other projects that are
using it. They seemed receptive to other groups using it, but it isn't like
other web platforms that have regular point releases that are supported for
a regular period of time.

Jim
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