Streamline and improve form documentation

Application by
Lina Wolf

What is your idea about?
What is the problem you are solving?

The EXT:form manual has been growing uncontrolled. Many pages
of the manual have had none or almost no visits within the
last 3 month. The manual is hard to use and too much work to
maintain.

We want to remove all API pages that have low visits and transfer
the information to comments in the YAML files themselves.

In addition, we want to improve the rest of the manual and its
visibility. This also includes adding a chapter for editors
explaining the different UI interfaces, form elements, as well as validators and finishers.

What is the potential impact of your idea?
Having the form extension within the TYPO3 Core is a big plus for the
TYPO3 community. However, doing anything beyond a normal
contact form needs an easy to find and easy to use documentation.

Maintaining a confusing and large documentation/ technical reference
has some big disadvantages. Whenever someone wants to contribute code
to the form framework, the person also has to change the monstrous
documentation. In the “best” case, it only consumes a large amount of
time, but more often, it stops people from contributing.

Streamlining the documentation will take stress off the developers.
They can then use their time and spare their nerves to improve the
product instead. As the documentation of the YAML configuration is
kept within the YAML files themselves it can be changed on the fly
while working on the code.

New users can be pointed to an up to date and easy to use manual
on how to create forms with TYPO3 without depending on third party
extensions.

Who can / should implement your idea?
I will take care myself

Approximate Funds needed
€5,000 - €10,000

4 Likes

Streamlining the documentation so that there is no duplicate content within the documentation and adding chapters for editors etc. is a good idea. But i would not remove any information about the API from the documentation but instead (1) try to either automate this, as is done in other documentation with extracting php domains from the code into the documentation, or (2) manually remove all redundancy in the documentation just once, so that the developer can easily find all places in code and documentation that need to be adjusted during ongoing maintenance. Like that, the documentation is still complete and easily accessible for the decision maker without inspecting the code.

1 Like