IMSLP:Site development/Project documentation

This is a project for the development, organization and maintenance of the documentation for the Petrucci Music Library wiki. Please use the associated forum thread for any discussion related to this project.

Contents

Rationale and goals

Documentation for the Petrucci Music Library website is currently sorely incomplete, outdated and disorganized. A good documentation is an essential component of good usability, in particular for newcomers.

The goal should be a complete and updated documentation of all important functions of the site. The structure should be clear and intuitive both for newcomers (linear organization of main topics) and returning users (index structures for easy reference).

Scope

Participants

Roadmap

For now, just a very rough outline:

  1. inventory currently existing documentation; delete all outdated documentation
  2. make a list of missing or inadequately covered topics
  3. develop a clear and easy to use structure for the documentation (maybe divide into basic/advanced?)

Inventory

  • Help:Contents currently contains info on
    • requesting page deletion (template) — more to be found on the page Help:Page deletion
    • adding copyright warnings (is this up to date?)
    • messaging user talk pages (email function is missing; maybe also mention forum PMs)
    • cache purging (could use an explanation in layman's terms)
    • uploading new versions of existing files
  • Help:Page creation by redlinks and by URL manipulation — is the latter method of any use at all?
  • Help:Page editing:
    • adding external and internal links
    • colored message boxes — these don't match the intended site design at all and should be phased out
    • navigation tree — phase out in favour of navigation boxes?
    • omitting TOC — say when (not) to do this?
    • redirects — add usage guidelines?
  • Help:Tutorial — keep or eliminate?

Missing or incomplete topics

  • how to edit work and composer pages (basic topic)
    • inserting composer images etc.
  • FTE syntax (advanced topic)
  • ...

Structure

  • Help:Contents should be turned into a table of contents and/or index, no actual content on this page
  • clarify correct usage of namespaces (Help:, IMSLP:)
  • navigation boxes, topic and/or alphabetical index

TOC draft

This draft for Help:Content includes pages both from Help: and IMSLP: namespaces.

  • contributing scores
    • [basically the current manual, seems mostly ok]
  • adding and correcting info
    • basic markup
    • editing composer and work pages (template syntax)
    • creating other pages (work lists etc.) [technical; conventions and best practices]
    • page deletion
    • useful templates (MoreInfo, and maybe others)
  • files
    • formats (should we omit DJVU and ZIP since they're obsolete? - also, do we need separate pages for each filetype?)
    • unlocking PDFs (and other procedures, like reducing size, splitting, merging etc)
  • community
    • user page? [policies?]
    • Babel and Instrument
    • contacting other users [user talk; email this user; forums]
    • administrators
    • copyright reviewers
    • forums
  • internationalization
    • iflang, where and when to use it (e.g. News), and how
  • advanced: editing the site structure
    • FTE...
    • design guide