Last year, Mautic took part in the Season of Docs, a project supported by Google that brings together technical writers and open source communities to work on a project for a couple of months.

We are excited to apply again as an organisation.

About the Google Season of Docs

You may have heard of the Google Summer of Code before – this is a similar program but applies specifically to documentation. The goal of the Google Season of Docs is

To provide a framework for technical writers and Open Source projects to work together towards the common goal of improving an Open Source project’s documentation.

For technical writers who are new to Open Source, this presents an opportunity to make your first contributions and get started with supporting an Open Source project. For technical writers who might already be contributing in Open Source, the program could be a new way of working together, or an opportunity to explore new projects.

The program brings together technical writers with an Open Source community for a period of a few months, bringing their writing expertise to the project’s documentation while learning about the project, community and technology behind it.

Together, we raise public awareness of Open Source documentation, technical writing, and how we can work together to the benefit of the global Open Source community.

The Education Team are excited to be proposing three projects for consideration by the Google Season of Docs team. All three projects are key to helping our users – whether developers, end-users or marketers – better understand how to work with Mautic. Read more about the project proposals below, and if you’re interested in learning more do join the Education Team channel on Slack!

Project Idea 1: Improve and update the Mautic Developer Documentation

Problem

• Mautic’s Developer Documentation is outdated and in many areas has incorrect code examples which have not been updated to support Mautic 3.x. This project will primarily focus on auditing and updating the documentation itself.

• The underlying tooling based on Slate should be updated – some work has started on this but we have not got the resources within the community to complete the task. This is a sub-task – a nice to have if you have the skills to help with this.

• There is some end-user focused documentation which should be extracted from the Developer Docs and moved over to the End-User documentation (specifically around themes). This is nice to have and will involve working with the Education Team to transfer the content.

• As a stretch goal, we can consider building out a developer portal. Initial ideas and scoping are being tracked in this Jira issue and this Google Doc.

Measuring project success?

• Resolution of outstanding issues in the issue queue and merging of outstanding pull requests (measured here for issues and here for pull requests),

• Updating Slate to the latest version and deploying with Github Actions when pull requests are merged.

• New contributions to the docs by demonstrating best practices and improving the docs on how to contribute (measured here ),

• An increase in the number of new developers working with Mautic (measured in our Github metrics, downloads and mailing list signups),

• Long term – improved developer sentiment (measured in Community CRM).

What skills would a technical writer need to work on this project?

Must have:

• Familiarity with GitHub, Slate (or comparable tools) and API documentation,

• Experience with Mautic and the Mautic API (or willingness to get up to speed quickly),

• Optionally experience with Grav and Markdown-based content for the stretch goal,

• Strong collaboration skills – you will be working with several teams and having to dig into the codebase and work with the Core Team to ensure that the documentation is top-notch!

Mentors

• Alan Hartless will be the primary mentor for this project,

• Ruth Cheesley can help with answering questions about Mautic and review pull requests for grammar, content and style,

• Favour Kelvin, Education Team Lead, can review pull requests,

• Dennis Ameling can help with Github automation and updating Slate.

Contact info

• Technical writers interested in working on this project should send an email to seasonofdocs@mautic.org – Please do not contact the mentors directly unless you have a specific question to ask them. Please include links to your technical writing work or portfolio/resumé/CV.

Project Idea 2: Implementing multilingual functionality on the Mautic End-User documentation

Problem

• Mautic is used by a worldwide audience and is available in 64 languages, but the documentation is currently only available in English.

• We would like to implement the facility to add other languages to the End-User Documentation.

• This project will involve implementing the technical details (language switcher etc) and working with the community to run some sprints to get the first translation completed and ready to launch. It will also involve translating technical documentation into Portuguese.

How would we measure success?

• An additional language available in the Mautic Documentation (starting with Portuguese as that is by far the most popular language),

• Increased contributions to the Documentation from new contributors in languages other than English by 50%.

What skills would a technical writer need to work on this project?

Must have:

• Experience with technical writing in languages other than English (preferably Portuguese),

• Familiarity with Github (or willingness to work through GitHub tutorials and learn the basics outside of this project).

Mentors

• Ruth Cheesley and Favour Kelvin will be the primary mentors for this project,

• Rodrigo Demetrio will be able to support reviewing translations in Portuguese.

Contact info

• Technical writers interested in working on this project should send an email to seasonofdocs@mautic.org – Please do not contact the mentors directly unless you have a specific question to ask them. Please include links to your technical writing work or portfolio/resumé/CV.

Project Idea 3: Adding more articles that answers FAQs in the knowledge base

Problem

• The Mautic Knowledge Base was released last year and already have a handful of articles that focuses on answering FAQs about Mautic.

• We have an increasing demand to support Mautic users FAQs and we don’t have enough articles that cover a lot of this.

• We need to more support articles in the knowledgebase to assist Mautic users.

How would we measure success?

• Decrease in the number of support issue and an increase in the number of page views by 50%.

• Increased contributions to the Knowledge base from new contributors by 50%.

What skills would a technical writer need to work on this project?

Must have:

• Familiarity with SEO optimization,

• Familiarity with Github (or willingness to work through GitHub tutorials and learn the basics outside of this project).

Mentors

• Favour Kelvin, Education Team Lead, will be the primary mentor for this project and can review pull requests,

• Ruth Cheesley can help with answering questions about Mautic and review pull requests for grammar, content and style.

Contact info

• Technical writers interested in working on this project should send an email to seasonofdocs@mautic.org – Please do not contact the mentors directly unless you have a specific question to ask them. Please include links to your technical writing work or portfolio/resumé/CV.

If you want to read more about our application, feel free to read the first blog article introducing the Season of Docs.

The Projects

Project End-User Documentation

The team: Ruth Cheesley, Norman Pracht, Swati Thacker

The first of our Season of Docs projects involved making some targeted improvements to the End User documentation at https://docs.mautic.org. This is usually the first place that Mautic users come to learn about working with Mautic, but much of the content was not well organised and some was out of date.

A quick rundown of how the End-User Documentation project went

In our first kick off calls we discussed what areas we should focus on and how to prioritise the tasks ahead of us.

We decided to target the main landing page which welcomes people to the docs and also includes information on how to contribute to improving the documentation. After this, we would focus on improving and restructuring and improving content in the Campaigns section.

Swati Thacker spent a good amount of time becoming familiar with Mautic and learning what parts of these documentation resources needed to be updated, alongside getting familiar with using Git to make her contributions.

During the course of this project Swati noted that we have a lot of spelling, grammar and style inconsistencies in the content, and suggested that we consider implementing a linter. Much like the code style checks we use to make sure that the code is written correctly, a linter would check new pull requests to the documentation for spelling, grammar and writing style against predefined configurations.

We are currently in the final stages of reviewing the implementation of the Vale linter using the Google Style Guide as our base.

Project Knowledgebase

The team: Leon Oltmanns, Kevin Rundle, Favour Kelvin

The second project resolved around the creation of a Knowledgebase for the Mautic open source project. A Knowledgebase is a collection of best-practises, how-to’s and tutorials, covering different aspects of Mautic. Knowledge that is important to share but not really suiting the narrow ties of the Documentation.

And not to spoil the end, but the Knowledgebase project was a huge success. Now to be found under https://kb.mautic.org/ sits the newly found Mautic Knowledgebase.

A quick rundown of how the Knowledgebase project went

At the beginning of the Season of Docs we, Leon Oltmanns and Favour Kelvin had a couple of kickoff meetings, discussing a rough timeline as well as a scope for the project. Which parts of the Knowledgebase do we need to “Go-Live”, what would be realistic to achieve in the months of working together, how do we process quality assurance and testing etc.

We pretty quickly had a baseline that we worked on using a Grav based page. From there we started working on the website while also writing articles at the same time. Favour Kelvin, as an experienced technical writer, wrote a remarkable proportion of the articles found in the knowledgebase. Leon spent most of his time configuring and building the website and coordinating with Favour, which articles should be written next.

This is how we proceed to work for a couple of months until the knowledgebase was ready to be launched in its first presentable iteration!

Since then the Knowledgebase grew step-by-step and if you, dear reader, want to contribute your knowledge to the Knowledgebase, you can do it right here.

Conclusion

We are delighted with the progress made by both of our technical writers who were new to Mautic and quickly jumped in to get started on their projects. Swati and Favour have both made substantial contributions during their projects and the Mautic Community has benefitted from their skills and enthusiasm for improving our documentation.

You will still see them around the community even after the projects have completed – Favour has now stepped up to lead the Education Team and Swati is working with us to refine the Vale linter on the main documentation project.

A big thank you to Google for organising this programme and to Swati and Favour for their awesome work!

New Drupal-based website

Firstly, a project funded by Acquia and developed by their Professional Services team, the old WordPress-based website has been superseded by a Drupal-based site.  With the brief for this MVP project being to carry out a like-for-like migration while improving responsiveness, accessibility and performance, there may not seem to be many changes on the surface but under the hood we have a stable, supported platform on which to build.

As part of this project we have also been able to contribute back to the Drupal community a Discourse/Drupal integration, and to the Grav community an Auth0/Grav plugin.

Importantly, this lays the foundations for us to build a fully multilingual site to better serve our international communities, and implements a full editorial workflow which enables contributors to help us maintain the website going forward.  Interested in getting involved with managing the website, writing content, or helping us grow our audience? Be sure to join the Marketing Team Slack channel!

New end-user documentation portal and Community Handbook

We have transitioned over to a new documentation portal for end-users of Mautic, which is powered by Grav.  This platform enables contributors to make updates and improvements to the content both via Pull Requests on Github, and through the user interface.  The Auth0 plugin we have contributed enables Mautic community members to use their existing Mautic Community account and, once part of the Documentation Team, to edit within the user interface.

Currently available in English, we have plans to translate (and maintain) the documentation in multiple languages.  We will be forming teams of documentation translators who will work with the Education Team to ensure that the content remains up to date.  Interested in helping? Join the Education Team Slack channel!

We also launched the Community Handbook using the same platform. This will become a one-stop-shop for all things related to the Mautic community going forward.  You will find information about how to get involved with the Mautic Community, contact details for the Leadership Team, our policies and ‘ways of working’ workflows, and much more.

Launching the Community Health Dashboard

With extensive support from our friends over at the CHAOSS Project, we are excited to share our Community Health Dashboard, based on the Open Source GrimoireLab tool.

The dashboard pulls in data from Github, Slack, Discourse and Meetup with the potential to add further data sources in the future.  We have already been using the dashboard to monitor various metrics and look forward to using it more extensively in the future.

Some metrics you might be interested in as a starting point:

• Engagement over time
• Contributor growth over time
• Organizational diversity
• PR Efficiency / Issues Efficiency

As this is built on Open Source tools, we can expand it to include more indexes and to capture more data.  If you have experience in developing with Python and would like to help in this area, please contact Ruth Cheesley on Slack to chat further!

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