Rails 3 Stuff Groundrules

This Posterous group is an unofficial Rails 3 documentation project intended to:

• fill gaps in the current documentation
• provide an open forum for anyone to contribute without having to worry about appropriateness or acceptance.
• experiment with different documentation styles dealing with the same subjects.
• creative commons attribution licensing for all content.

Filling in Gaps

The current Rails doc consists of the API documentation, Edge Rails Guides, some books (always out of date), scattered blog posts, etc.

But the authoritative doc is actually the Code itself and stuff which is in the heads of the core team.

There’s a lot missing if one wants to, for example, write a Rails3 extension which hooks into the Rails 3 initialization process. See my post called ‘Writing a Rails 3.0 Gem’ for an example of what I mean.

Open Forum

Anybody who wants to can contribute.

Please make comments which constructively improve the posts you read.

Comments such as ‘hey – this is great stuff’ are appreciated, but what we will really want are improvements

Documentation Style Experiments

Everybody has opinions about how things should be written. Should they be exacting and precise or like a novel or tutorial style or like a graphic novel or whatever.

Everybody also has different needs at different times: sometimes a tutorial is the right thing – but if you already know the general structure, you probably need a concise, boring reference. Or if you’re looking for how to use a specific method, you probably need an index into the API doc.

Write it however you want – the more variety, the better this group will be.

Then we can let the viewers pick what works for them.

Licensing

Everything here will be covered by the Creative Commons Attribution license.