Documentation

Overview

This special interest group improves Jenkins use and adoption through documentation. The SIG encourages, creates, and reviews documentation contributions and improves documentation with contributors and external communities.

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Members

Lead:
Participants:
 

Description

The SIG offers a venue for all kinds of documentation creation, improvement, and delivery.

The group focuses on documentation for Jenkins, including:

Documentation SIG may cooperate with other groups. For example, we cooperate with the Platform SIG on platform topics.

Topics

  • Reviewing weekly changelogs

  • Creating and reviewing LTS changelogs and LTS upgrade guides

  • Creating new documentation

  • Improving existing documentation

  • Reviewing documentation contributions

  • Coordinating documentation initiatives

  • Reviewing Jenkins Enhancement Proposals (JEPs) related to documentation

Contributing

See this page for information about contributing to Jenkins documentation. It contains links for newcomers and seasoned contributors. If you have any questions or ideas, please feel free to reach out to us using the channels listed on the right panel.

Projects

This section lists some of the projects working under the direction of this SIG. See the SIG meeting notes for more information about ongoing projects.

Google Season of Docs

Google Season of Docs brings together open source communities and technical writers for the benefit of both. The program raises awareness of open source, of documentation, and of technical writing.

See our Google Season of Docs status page for documentation project ideas, contact information, and more.

Plugin documentation on GitHub

Currently the SIG is migrating plugin documentation from Jenkins Wiki to GitHub. Documentation in the plugin GitHub repository provides a good user experience for Jenkins users seeking documentation. At the same time, plugin maintainers now can follow the documentation-as-code approach and make documentation changes a part of the pull requests. It also gives an opportunity to review the documentation changes and to add documentation contributor recognition, especially if the story is combined with changelog automation.

As of November 2022 we have more than 900 plugins which already use GitHub as a documentation source, but there are still hundreds of plugins to migrate. We invite contributors to participate in the project and to help us with migrating the docs. It is also a great opportunity to update and copy-edit the documentation.

Useful links:

Plugin site integration with GitHub

Jenkins Plugin Site currently uses GitHub to get plugin documentation (see above) and tags (using GitHub topics). Release information is also pulled from GitHub releases. There are still some areas for improvement, such as parsing of CHANGELOG.md files to get release information for plugins that don’t use GitHub releases. This project is tracked in the WEBSITE-637 EPIC.

Useful links:

User Guide Rework

Jenkins user topics are included in the current Jenkins Handbook. Feedback requests are frequently received to improve user documentation. Common improvement themes include adding migration of the documentation from Wiki, pipeline examples with each of the pipeline steps, additional tutorials for new users, better search and navigation.

Links:

Administrator Guide

Jenkins administration topics are included in the current Jenkins Handbook. Navigation can be improved for administrators by separating the administration topics into a separate volume. This project will create a separate Jenkins Administrator Guide with content specific for administrators. This project is tracked in the WEBSITE-738 EPIC.

Solution Pages

Jenkins solution pages highlight specific use cases for Jenkins users. Those solutions include SCM provider solutions (GitHub, Bitbucket), programming language solutions (Python, Ruby, C/C++, Java, and PHP), and execution environment solutions (Pipeline, Docker, Embedded, and Android). An excellent opening page has been provided by Zbynek Konecny. Additional use cases and user stories are being collected by Alyssa Tong.

The appearance and navigation of those solution pages needs improvement. The existing pages should be revisited and improved so that users of specific solutions can find what they need on jenkins.io. This project is tracked in the WEBSITE-742 EPIC.

Documentation Reviews

Office Hours

Documentation office hours are held each Thursday at 18:00 UTC (Europe and US East) and each Friday at 01:30 UTC (Asia and US West). Office hours are conducted and recorded using Zoom and archived to the Jenkins YouTube channel in the Jenkins Docs SIG YouTube playlist. Participant links are posted in the SIG Gitter Chat 10 minutes before the meeting starts.

Meetings

The Documentation SIG meetings are part of the documentation office hours. Meetings are conducted and recorded using Zoom and archived to the Jenkins YouTube channel in the Jenkins Docs SIG YouTube playlist. Participant links are posted in the SIG Gitter Chat 10 minutes before the meeting starts.

Meeting Agendas

Meeting agendas and meeting notes for the SIG are posted in this Google Document. Anyone is welcome to add a topic for an upcoming meeting by suggesting a change in the agenda.

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