State of HelpHub February 2018

What is HelpHub?

Project HelpHub is the user documentation base that will sit on WordPress.org/support. It’s the companion to Developer’s Hub which serves development documentation.

The general guiding philosophy for the design, content creation, and build of the project is – Help users help themselves.

We want users to be able to find answers on WordPress.org before posting on the forums. We want to make documentation more discoverable, through enabling search, visual improvements and concise targeted content.

We’ve been working on HelpHub for some time now and its possibly the final item that needs completion from the roadmap created by the Docs Team way back in 2013.

What’s the difference?

The biggest change is actually using WordPress to power content!

Shifting away from Codex was a deliberate decision

What we like about the Codex
What we hate about the Codex
Developer issues with the Codex
User issues with the Codex
Codex traffic breakdown

Scribbles the Docs Team did in 2013, suffice to say Codex wasn’t enough

Too many pages that deal with the same issue (we have 4 getting started pages!)
Conflation of user and developer content
Content is hard to navigate
Content is way way way way way too verbose
Too much irrelevant content
Codex couldn’t be realistically improved in it’s functionality to deliver meaningful content

HelpHub aims to curate articles in a more concise way with standardised formatting and screenshots where possible.

Up-to-date screenshots
Consistent formatting, improved readability

Proper editing via WordPress back end & Gutenberg

Better categorisation & discovery
Gutenberg Editing

The possibility to add functionality as need arises

Adding read time to help keep articles concise

Current State

We want to release a minimum viable product, and we have classified it as such below:

MVP – Plenty better than Codex

Better content
Internal search
Improved readability through design and content re-writes
Better article discovery through better categorisation
REST API endpoints

Phase 2 & beyond – Iteration

Phase 2 & beyond will have the team working on the enhancements on top of the basic features. We’ll keep iterating to make things more use-able, easier for people to collaborate and of course create better content.

Examples are

WordPress Search -> ElasticSearch
Simple input search -> Auto complete and Suggestions via JS
And more

We’ll also work on new features based on understanding how well the basic ones work and what the general end public needs next. Such could be article voting, direct article contribution via Feedback or user guides for example.

Team

Many people came in to help, unfortunately, life happens. We will need some consistent help going forward.

It is also plainly obvious that having an overall project lead isn’t enough to help tackle the pre-launch needs, let alone the post launch ones.

They have already been doing these tasks but it would be great to properly introduce them

Content Lead: Akira Tachibana @atachibana
Design Lead: Mark Uraine @mapk
Development Co-Lead: Marius “L” Jensen @clorith
Development Co-Lead: Milana Cap @milana_cap
Project Lead: Jon Ang @kenshino

Release Date

Our focus right now is to complete the development work for MVP and also work with the Meta and Support Team to properly setup HelpHub on WordPress.org

We aim to release HelpHub latest by 31st May 2018. We are working however to release it earlier than that.

Progress of Phase 1 (MVP)

Articles are appropriately categorised
Many popular articles were re-written
General WordPress.org styling are being merged in

We’re now focusing on the tasks needed to ensure proper integration to be the Hub Page of WordPress.org/support

What do we need?

Developers. Consistent developers who are familiar with WordPress & PHP coding standards and good practices.

Content Migrators and Editors who are familiar with editing in WordPress.

If you would like to join us, you can do so in the following ways

Comment here
Join us at HelpHub meetings Tuesdays at 15:00 UTC in #docs
Ping @clorith or @zzap for development, @atachibana for content on Make WordPress Slack

Take a look

We have the the staging version of the site up. (It still requires a fair bit of styling fix but the fundamental code to run it is in). It’s not the prettiest right now but we’re working on it. And we could certainly use your help!.

See it in action here – https://wp-helphub.com/

Project Documents & Links

Github Repository: https://github.com/kenshino/helphub
Contributing to Helphub: https://make.wordpress.org/docs/handbook/helphub/getting-started-with-helphub/
Staging Site: https://wp-helphub.com/