Re-energizing Our Documentation and Support Experience

[Jono Bacon]

On Wed, 2011-06-22 at 11:01 -0500, Jim Campbell wrote:
> 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.

Ditto!

>                 
>                      * 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.

I think the first step is assessing the suitability of Sumo and how well
it meets our needs. From what I can tell, it is great in terms of
displaying, finding, editing, and translating content, but it would also
need to be themed, support OpenID auth, and likely a few other things.

What I am keen to do now is to identify these requirements and needs and
put together a plan in which we can iteratively tick bits and pieces
off, thus heading towards a consistent solution.

I am mainly keen to put together a plan and keep working towards and end
goal.
 
>         
>         
>                 
>                 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.

It sounds like these would not be huge blockers. Canonical IS should be
able to provide the hosting solution for the site, but they will want to
do a security audit to ensure the code doesn't do anything crazy. This
should not be a big problem.

In the meantime, I think we mainly need a test server set up so we can
play with it, and encourage developers to fill in some of the gaps that
we have (e.g. theme and OpenID auth). Adam, would you be interested in
setting up a Sumo server as you are a server guy?

I think one other side benefit is that if we base our docs on Sumo, it
could encourage Mozilla to make the project more generically useful
(e.g. have a project website, download details, encourage code
contributions etc).

	Jono

-- 
Jono Bacon
Ubuntu Community Manager
jono(at)ubuntu(dot)com
www.ubuntu.com : www.jonobacon.org
www.twitter.com/jonobacon : www.identi.ca/jonobacon