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This is the project blog of Multilingual NetBeans Community Docs Program- a community documentation project which has grown in leaps-and-bounds since it was launched in March, 2007. We have had high quality contributions and more enthusiastic community members.


We have stopped publishing weekly newsletters, however we started off publishing monthly one's instead. Scroll down for latest posts on this blog!

Last Updated: Oct 14, 2009

Thursday, November 6, 2008

NetBeans Community Docs Reloaded

Howdy,

Guess what, we accomplish yet another milestone- we have now got 250 community-contributed documents!

It's been 10 days since NetBeans Official Birthday (October 26, 2008) and today, we have finally made it. So, we acknowledge our dearest contributors for their time and support. Thank you, thank you so much for contributing!

Reloading Documentation

As a result of a discussion that took place few weeks back on our mailing lists. Now, it's the right time to announce some major developments that were taking place under the hood for the common good.

Firstly,
Have a look at the Main contribution list at Community Docs;
http://wiki.netbeans.org/CommunityDocs_Contributions

Now, as you will note change in color of table headers, that's something new I discovered while exploring wiki.netbeans.org! They are actually sortable headers, you click any header and see it live. Its cool :-) Another thing to notice, the category mentioned in each row is click-able either pointing to Developer FAQs or newly created sub-level wikis..

Sub-level wikis..
Currently, community can look for tutorials, tips and tricks, screencasts and articles. Also, there are localized wikis (Spanish, German) being made in parallel to these English ones!

Consequences..
So, what would happen now, is that when you contribute a documentation, it gets first listed into the Main list as pointed out earlier. Also, the category to which it belongs to will be converted into a hyperlink, so as to point to the category-specific wiki listing several documentations falling under that category. Also, this makes it easier to locate community-contributed docs for specific details, just mentioned.

For instance,
Let's say there's a user who's new to NetBeans wants a tutorial/guide to know how to install NetBeans on Ubuntu, Fedora, etc.. We can direct him to the following wiki-page;
http://wiki.netbeans.org/NBCDTutorials and then, go to "Installation" section from Table of Contents.

In short, go to-
http://wiki.netbeans.org/NBCDTutorials#section-NBCDTutorials-Installation

How simple it becomes to actually find community contributed documentation :-)

Secondly,
We have reached a point where we can have the NetBeans Community Docs project in localized languages. So, we have setup the Community Docs in German and Spanish. These initiatives have been driven by our evangelists, Kristian and Aristides.

Also, in the respective localized setups, they have created localized guides for "Getting Started with NetBeans Docs" and "Tutorial template", so as the Spanish and German users can quickly get started with contributing documentations.

Thirdly,
Each and every table present in top-level and various sub-level wikis (we would now be maintaining) would have sortable headers.

Finally,
The Community Docs Wiki, would continue to aggregate localized and English wikis, however Spanish and German would only aggregate the respective localized docs. Note- data would first go into the Main list, then only rest parallel wikis and sub-level wikis would be updated..

Hope this helps!

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