• See previous BP Docs-Chat Summary April 30, 2025
• In attendance: @dcavins,  @narenin (async), @emaralive
• Slack Archive
• @emaralive will lead the next docs-chat meeting!

To Note: async (asynchronous) is a situation when an individual is not present during the meeting but, made an effort to make their presence known after the adjournment of the meeting. Additionally, user handles are taken from their respective Slack accounts and may not match up to WordPress.com accounts.

Summary: Due to @dcavins having to leave the meeting early, the meeting was adjourned after 30 minutes. There were 2 main points for the agenda regarding the 2nd item (Continuation of the “revisit for the Update README with Documentation roadmap” – Part 6):

• Finish up on any additional comments regarding the Slate tool, e.g., what info should be included in the feasibility study?
• Determine the next tool to be slated for a feasibility study

BP Documentation tracker status:

The stats – 58%, there was no change in percentage points – 58% ➡ 58%

NOTE: The stats remained flat due to no new issues were submitted and completions remained the same..

There is 1 (one) issue that is currently In Progress. For details see the In Progress section (Note: Project views are dynamic and are subject to change without notice).

Due to a reduction in the number of writers/authors, the documentation effort has slowed to a crawl.

The anomaly (truncated entries) with exporting view data while in Board layout was still present.

Continuation of the “revisit for the Update README with Documentation roadmap” – Part 6:

Phase 2 – conduct feasibility studies for potential tools which should determine the “final web home“

Regarding “additional comments” for the feasibility study that is “in progress”, some points of interest conveyed were:

• The original Slate repo had been forked.
• Installation of some required software, e.g. Ruby, etc., will occur.
• Cloning of the forked repo locally will occur.
• Attempt to build and deploy locally – using Slate natively

As for “which tool should be up next for a feasibility study“, there was concurrence that the next tool as listed in the “To Do” section would be an adequate approach; meaning, the “Docusaurus” tool will be up next.

Phase 2 feasibility studies status

• In progress:
  • Woocommerce REST API documentation, based on Slate – proposed here ❗
• To Do:
  • WordPress Playground documentation, based on Docusaurus – mentioned here
  • WordPress Advanced Administration Handbook, based on WordPress – inferred here
  • GitHub Wiki – mentioned during April 2, 2025 meeting.
• Completed:
  • TBD

❗ – in progress, ⭐ completed – toying with emojis to indicate basic status of any given study – no emoji indicates “to do”.

To provide context to this ongoing saga, there was information posted related to the backstory of how the documentation effort has progressed from inception to the current process for the creation of documentation, for example:

BP Documentation choices

• July 12, 2023: use BuddyPress code repository to reorganize/migrate/update/improve the BuddyPress Codex.
• January 10, 2024: create this repository to track BuddyPress Codex migration tasks as well as new documentation tasks.
• January 24, 2024: using GitHub to contribute on the next BuddyPress documentation is our choice & it’s a good one!

Note: This agenda item is slated to be on the agenda for the next documentation meeting as a continuance.

Open Floor:

Due to a limiting factor of a 30 minute time constraint (as noted in the summary), there was only time for @dcavins to express his interest by stating:

I am interested to see how easily these various documentation software answers will work.

Next Docs-Chat

Our next documentation meeting will happen on May 28, 2025 at 19:00 UTC in #BuddyPress.

#docs-chat, #documentation, #summary

• See previous BP Docs-Chat Summary April 2, 2025
• In attendance: @dcavins,  @mjaragon, @chellycat, @narenin (async), @emaralive
• Slack Archive
• @emaralive will lead the next docs-chat meeting!

To Note: async (asynchronous) is a situation when an individual is not present during the meeting but, made an effort to make their presence known after the adjournment of the meeting. Additionally, user handles are taken from their respective Slack accounts and may not match up to WordPress.com accounts.

Highlight: We were graced by the attendance of 2 new attendees (1st time for the docs-chat meeting), @mjaragon and @chellycat which was a pleasant surprise. @mjaragon had questions regarding contributing to the documentation effort which was, more or less, confirmation of a basic understanding of how the documentation process worked, in general.

BP Documentation tracker status:

The stats – 58%, there was no change in percentage points – 58% ➡ 58%

NOTE: The stats remained flat due to no new issues were submitted and completions remained the same..

There is 1 (one) issue that is currently In Progress. For details see the In Progress section (Note: Project views are dynamic and are subject to change without notice).

Due to a reduction in the number of writers/authors, the documentation effort has slowed to a crawl.

The anomaly (truncated entries) with exporting view data while in Board layout was still present.

Continuation of the “revisit for the Update README with Documentation roadmap” – Part 4 :

There is a correction to this agenda item, what was published during the meeting was a heading containing the text – Part 3, when it should have been Part 4.

Regarding the feasibility studies, the approach that was settled on was to tackle one study at a time with the first up being the Slate Docs tool:

• Woocommerce REST API documentation, based on Slate – proposed here

Notably, @dcavins brought up the fact that there is, currently, an established format for the BP REST API Handbook (version 1) that is Web based. The pages for this Handbook were manually created via the backend (wp-admin > BP REST API Handbook pages) on the developer.buddypress.org site. Although not mentioned during the meeting, there is also the beginnings of a new subchapter/section for the version 2 BuddyPress REST API (v2) source documents located in the main BuddyPress repository.

The following is a list of potential tools that will/may have an impact on the document creation process, on deck for a feasibility study is the 1st item, the Slate Docs tool (API Docs Generator), as previously indicated.

• Conduct feasibility studies for 4 possible hosting tools and choose the best or most practical option, which should determine the “final web home“, coined by @dcavins :
  • Woocommerce REST API documentation, based on Slate – proposed here ❗
  • WordPress Playground documentation, based on Docusaurus – mentioned here
  • WordPress Advanced Administration Handbook, based on WordPress – inferred here
  • GitHub Wiki – mentioned during this meeting

❗ – in progress, ⭐ completed – toying with emojis to indicate basic status of any given study – no emoji indicates “to do”.

To provide context to this ongoing saga, there was information posted related to the backstory of how the documentation effort has progressed from inception to the current process for the creation of documentation, for example:

BP Documentation choices

• July 12, 2023: use BuddyPress code repository to reorganize/migrate/update/improve the BuddyPress Codex.
• January 10, 2024: create this repository to track BuddyPress Codex migration tasks as well as new documentation tasks.
• January 24, 2024: using GitHub to contribute on the next BuddyPress documentation is our choice & it’s a good one!

Note: This agenda item is slated to be on the agenda for the next documentation meeting as a continuance.

Open Floor:

The following are the specifics to the questions that @mjaragon had raised (as indicated in Highlights):

“In order to contribute to the BuddyPress doc project (as a non-developer), the steps would be:

1. Pick one of the tasks from the “todo” column in the board (like for example, “[Add]: Members component explanation“)
2. Use the outdated codex page as a baseline to create/update the new documentation (example for the members component)
3. Create the new/updated doc as a .md file (similar to this one)
4. Commit & submit a PR to merge that new page I create to the docs repo (in the case of the members component, it’d be to buddypress/docs/user)”

Additionally, @mjaragon declared the following:

“I have something to declare! 

I was very, very happy to find that this docs-update project is currently active.  

BuddyPress is an amazing tool, and it broke my heart a little every time I encountered out-of-date documents or corners that hadn’t been maintained for a while.

It is very motivating and energizing to know that you’re all continuing to work towards an updated version that could help share BuddyPress with more people who might not yet know about it (and might be discouraged from using it due to what I mentioned above).

It’s a great plugin, it’s served us well, and it deserves the love”

Lastly, there was a brief conversation regarding the possibility of renaming some of titles for the Support forums, e.g., from How-to & Troubleshooting to just Troubleshooting. The rationale is that there appears to be some redundancy/overlap with forum titles and in the previous example, the How-to can be covered by the Creating & Extending forum. Since this was just some initial thoughts, more would have to be detailed out to make sense of this thought (tip of the iceberg), perhaps in a discussions topic within the bp-documentation repository.

Next Docs-Chat

Our next documentation meeting will happen on April 30, 2025, at 19:00 UTC in #BuddyPress.

#docs-chat, #documentation, #summary

• See previous BP Docs-Chat Summary March 19, 2025
• In attendance: @dcavins,  @narenin (async), @emaralive
• Slack Archive
• @emaralive will lead the next docs-chat meeting!

To Note: async (asynchronous) is a situation when an individual is not present during the meeting but, made an effort to make their presence known after the adjournment of the meeting. Additionally, user handles are taken from their respective Slack accounts and may not match up to WordPress.com accounts.

BP Documentation tracker status:

The stats – 58%, there was no change in percentage points – 58% ➡ 58%

NOTE: The stats remained flat due to no new issues were submitted and completions remained the same..

There is 1 (one) issue that is currently In Progress. For details see the In Progress section (Note: Project views are dynamic and are subject to change without notice).

Due to a reduction in the number of writers/authors, the documentation effort has slowed to a crawl.

Something odd occurred while attempting to calculate the stats. A typical calculation consists of exporting the view data from the bp-documentation project, i.e., export view data, which is a Tab-Separated Values file (.tsv) and normally consists of what represents 81 total entries, given that no new issues have been submitted. Well, this time around there were only 51 entries, which is the odd part. To add more context, there are 3 layouts for any given view and the default view utilized by the bp-documentation project is Board:

• Table
• Board
• Roadmap

Each of the layouts has the option for exporting the view data and switching to either the Table or Roadmap layout produces a .tsv file that consists of 81 entries which is what is expected. This should have been the expected number of entries for the Board layout, however, for April 2 2025, the Board layout was only producing 51 entries which is odd. Whether this will be consistent behavior or just a glitch will be determined at a later date. For now, the workaround is to use the Table or Roadmap layout for the exporting of the view data.

Continuation of the “revisit for the Update README with Documentation roadmap” – Part 3 :

The main takeaways from this conversation were:

• Keeping Release information in one place:
  • Codex Releases page – this has been the standard place and will continue to be the standard place
  • There was a previous attempt to use GitHub – the following pages will be removed at a later date.
    • Major releases history
    • Branch 9.0 ChangeLog
• Conduct feasibility studies for 4 possible hosting tools and choose the best or most practical option, which should determine the “final web home“, coined by @dcavins :
  • Woocommerce REST API documentation, based on Slate – proposed here
  • WordPress Playground documentation, based on Docusaurus – mentioned here
  • WordPress Advanced Administration Handbook, based on WordPress – inferred here
  • GitHub Wiki – mentioned during this meeting

To provide context to this ongoing saga, there was information posted related to the backstory of how the documentation effort has progressed from inception to the current process for the creation of documentation, for example:

BP Documentation choices

• July 12, 2023: use BuddyPress code repository to reorganize/migrate/update/improve the BuddyPress Codex.
• January 10, 2024: create this repository to track BuddyPress Codex migration tasks as well as new documentation tasks.
• January 24, 2024: using GitHub to contribute on the next BuddyPress documentation is our choice & it’s a good one!

Note: This agenda item is slated to be on the agenda for the next documentation meeting as a continuance.

Open Floor:

The conversation here was just a continuation of the 2nd agenda item – Continuation of the “revisit…

Next Docs-Chat

Our next documentation meeting will happen on April 16, 2025, at 19:00 UTC in #BuddyPress.

#docs-chat, #documentation, #summary