Year In Review: Blogs, Wikis, Evangelists and More...

So, 2 days left for New Year 2009 and everyone's in party mood, so are we. However, we want to end this year with a special review done by none-other-than James Branam, NetBeans Community Docs Program Manager.

Year 2008

2008 was a very successful year for the NetBeans Community Docs program, and I am proud to say that all of you played a role in its success. I especially would like to thank Contribution Coordinator Varun Nischal for his tremendous achievements and innovative leadership, both of which were vital factors in the growth of the program.

2008 also saw the appointment of Community Docs Evangelists, increased multi-language documentation, the publication of a regular newsletter, and a blog dedicated to the program. 2008 was also a good year for the program in terms of recognition. It was highlighted in several articles and as part of NetBeans 10th Birthday celebration.

Year 2009

2009 is nearly here, and the program will continue to evolve. We want to take the existing momentum and expand the program to reach a wider range of contributors. We also want to increase focusing on quality of contributions and adherence to existing style guides. Another challenge we look forward to engaging is creating a more purposeful documentation wish list and creating specialists for certain types of documentation.

On April 1, a new Contribution Coordinator will take the reins: Kristian Rink. A long time participant in the program, Kristian will bring new ideas to the program, building on the strong foundation that Amit Kumar Saha and Varun Nischal have established.

Happy New Year

I look forward to the new year and the challenges it will certainly bring. More importantly, I am proud to be working with such fine people as you all are, and I wish you a happy, healthy, and successful 2009.

Thank You!

Season Greetings

On behalf of the NetBeans Community Docs Team, I would like to wish each one of you who has been part of this successful community-driven project, NetBeans Community Docs Program...

Merry Christmas, as well as want to tell you that on 29th December, 2008. We would be publishing 20th and the last edition of Weekly Newsletter, as thereafter you would receive Monthly Newsletters...

So, make sure you don't miss the special edition next week...

Stay Tuned for more...

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!

Latest Updates

Updated on Dec 30, 2008

With the release of 20th edition,
the series of weekly newsletters comes to end..

NBCD Weekly Newsletters

Monday, 18th August- The day, we launched a unique blog series of newsletters, featuring content concerned with the happenings within the NetBeans Community Docs Program.

• Spotlight of the Week
• Latest Docs
• Contributions within that week
  
• Special News
• and few more...

Early October 2008,

It got started in English, however Kristian Rink, NBCD Evangelist, also the NetBeans Dream Team Member posted first ever German translation of our weekly newsletters.

During NetBeans B'day Bash,

Aristides Villarreal Bravo, NBCD Evangelist, one of the founding members and still a member of the NetBeans Dream Team, posted first ever Spanish translation of our weekly newsletters.

Figure: Look on the right-panel of this blog for the above widget and then,
click on "/Weekly" for English feeds, and "German", "Spanish" for Translated feeds..

Email Subscriptions..

You can subscribe these feeds through email as well, for English (en_US) and for German (de_DE) or Spanish (es_ES). Those who have already subscribed, should consider staying with subscription for sometime and wait for further announcements.

Its Not Over Yet..

We would be releasing Monthly Newsletters from January 2009 onwards. Read the complete story in the latest edition of weekly newsletter. Necessary details would be posted on the blog, twitter and mailing list.

Happy NetBeaning!

Catering to a wider audience

At the NetBeans Community Docs, we have seen a steady stream of flow of non-English docs over the past few months.

We now non-English speaking evangelists as well.

Today, we just take one step more to reach to the large non-English speaking NetBeans Community with a Google Translate Gadget (top right) on this blog. It will automatically allow you to view the page in any of the chosen language from the supported languages.

Have fun.