As you might have noticed, we've published a lot of new tutorials on symfony 1.1 on this blog during the last two weeks.

These tutorials are also permanently available in the symfony cookbook:

They are quite easy and fast to read as they are short and focus on a single subject.

As they are all independent from each other, they are also very simple to translate. Anybody with one hour to share can translate a tutorial in his native language. That's a great way to contribute back something to the community and help spread the word about symfony around the world. As of now, the cookbook has some translations in portuguese, french, spanish, and german. It also means that many different authors can contribute to this series of tutorials.

To help organize this documentation and translation effort, I am very happy to announce a new mailing-list on Google Groups:

http://groups.google.com/group/symfony-docs

All the documentation sources (the symfony book, the upcoming forms book, the askeet tutorial, the tutorials, and the cookbook) are in the markdown format and are available in the symfony subversion repository. Each day, the online documentation is generated from the latest version of the repository, which means that all the changes are automatically available the next day on the symfony website.

So, if you want to translate a tutorial or have an idea for a new one, here is the process:

  • Subscribe to the new mailing-list
  • Discuss what you want to do (write a new tutorial or translate an existing one)
  • Write or translate
  • Test your markdown by converting it to HTML with the symfony online converter
  • Publish your work on the mailing-list for review
  • Ask for a SVN account (email me with your trac login)
  • Commit your changes to the repository

Even if symfony has already one of the best documentation ever for an Open-Source project, you can help us make it even better.

Published in #Documentation