[Banshee-List] Banshee Documentation

[Paul Cutler <pcutler gnome org>]

As a follow up from the meeting last week, I wanted to outline some of the stuff going on with writing documentation for Banshee.

Banshee will be written in Mallard[1], the new markup that GNOME documentation will be moving to, replacing Docbook.  Especially for new contributors, Mallard is much easier to learn, as it doesn't have 4 different ways to write the same thing.  Documentation will continue to use the GNOME Documentation Style Guide[2].

Banshee will also be written as topic based documentation - think of each topic as a mini-howto on how to perform a task in Banshee.  This makes it easier for users to find the help they need, rather than documenting a specific process, which is not only dry, but doesn't always help the user find the help they need when they need it.

Some examples of topic based help to include in Banshee:

* Adding Media to Banshee
* Adding a Podcast
* Adding an Internet Radio station
* Editing Metadata
* Sorting Music
* Syncing Music with a DAP
* Removing Media from Banshee
* Importing a CD
* Playing Media

If anyone has other topics they would like to see, please reply to this email!  If you'd like to help with writing documentation, please reply to the list, send me an email or ping me on IRC.  Please don't feel that you have to know Mallard - I'm more than happy to help with grammar and editing and add the Mallard markup as well.

There is a banshee-docs branch on Gitorious[3].  To view or test documentation in Mallard, you will need gnome-doc-utils 0.17.2 and Yelp 2.27.2 or newer, both from GNOME git.  Once those are installed, and you've checked out banshee-docs form gitorious, you have to run yelp with the full path to the help file:  yelp /home/user/path/to/checkout/help/C/index.page  The files currently in Gitorious are stubs at best, and I'll be working on them with a goal of having the first round of docs ready by August 31st.

I'd love some help if anyone is interested, and if you have any questions, please let me know.

Thanks!

Paul

[1] http://www.gnome.org/~shaunm/mallard/
[2] http://library.gnome.org/devel/gdp-style-guide/stable/
[3] http://gitorious.org/~pcutler/banshee/docs