Hello all,
As many of you know, Jamie van Dyke and I have been working on the
Caboose Rails Documentation Project for a few months now, adding
documentation patches to the API docs. By way of a progress update,
we have first iteration patches in for ActionView, a few pieces of
ActionController, and a good chunk of ActiveRecord. A number of these
have some problems that we’re working out and such, but over all we’re
making progress! 
As we’ve worked on this project and discussed it with the Core team,
we’ve noticed that maybe a more open, community editing process would
be beneficial. This would help give us immediate feedback from the
people who will be using the docs: the community. While at the same
time, we’ve discussed it with a number of community members (in
general and at a Birds of a Feather session at RailsConf), and we’ve
noticed that many of you feel like (a) you’re seeing no results and
(b) you should be. And that’s very true. So in the interest of
providing you with results (you ARE paying for this, so you should be
seeing some results!) and offering more of what users need, we’re
growing the project a bit and opening
http://www.railsdocumentation.org/.
The site is primarily split into four parts. The first part is the
API documentation; there you’ll find our “version” of the docs, with
all of our patches applied. You can browse through them, enjoy them,
and download a “mega patch” that will apply all of our doc patches to
your Rails codebase. You’ll also find an issue tracker (generously
provided by the guys at Lighthouse) for filing tickets on any issues
you see in the current patches and any places that you think need more
API documentation.
Secondly, you’ll see that we’ve posted the start to a narrative book.
Jamie started his own open source Rails book, Getting Started with
Rails, that he hasn’t been able to devote much time to lately. As
such, he decided to turn it over to the community, where we can all
work on it. You’re able to download a PDF version and the LaTeX
source. Read the PDF and submit patches on the LaTeX back to us!
You’ll see that we have a section for minidocs. These will be
targeted guides, something similar in spirit to
manuals.rubyonrails.org. We don’t actually have any right now, so if
you’ve written one, please let us know by e-mailing us at the address
on that page!
Lastly, you’ll see we’ve spun up some community channels. There is an
IRC channel on Freenode called #rails-doc, where Jamie and I (and
others hopefully) will hang out to answer questions, discuss
documentation, talk about patches and so on. There’s also a mailing
list for discussion and such.
This is going to be a community effort, so I invite (and implore! ;))
you to come and get involved in what we’re doing.
Thanks,
Jeremy
–
http://www.jeremymcanally.com/
My free Ruby e-book:
http://www.humblelittlerubybook.com/book/
My blogs: