osCommerce Knowledge Base
osCommerce Documentation Collaboration Effort | Last Update: 6th June, 2004 Article ID: 193 |
- Introduction
- How To Participate In The Effort
- How Knowledge Base Articles Are Written
Introduction
This article aims to introduce the community to the osCommerce Documentation Collaboration Effort and provide information to community members who feel they can offer their resources to help with the effort in providing documentation for the project.
The goals of the Knowledge Base is to document all areas of the osCommerce project suitable for everyone from store owners to developers, that address issues such as installation on local and remote / hosted servers, configuration and administration guides, and general tutorials, frequently asked questions, help, tips, tricks, and how-to guides.
The content of the Knowledge Base will be up-to-date to match the current development version, with HTML and PDF based documentation sets being made available when stable project releases are made, for both online viewing and download packages for offline viewing.
The osCommerce Documentation Team is responsible for maintaining the Knowledge Base content and the documentation channels available on the Community Support Forums.
How To Participate In The Effort
We welcome anyone who has interest in participating in the documentation effort to forward their work to the Collaboration Documentation Effort forum channel, and to get in touch with an existing osCommerce Documentation Team member to discuss the possibilities of joining the documentation team.
Before new Documentation Team members are accepted, work has had to be submited to the Collaboration Documentation Effort forum channel.
How Knowledge Base Articles Are Written
Standards exist for the preferred manner on how knowledge base articles should be written. This allows one set of design layout rules to be used for all knowledge base articles, which allows viewers to quickly understand and navigate the content of the knowledge base.
The basic rules a knowledge base article should meet are:
- Use Of Introductions - each article should include one or more introduction paragraphs that describe the issues the article aims to address.
- Correct Use Of Grammar - articles should be written in a user-friendly and professional manner. Phrases such as "you go here and do this, then you go there and do that" should only be used at personal meetings in bars.
- Relationships - note down the relationships the article may have with existing articles so that a relationship link can be created.
- Independent Articles - each article should concentrate only on one issue and be independent of other articles.