Welcome

Write the Docs is a place where the art and science of documentation can be practiced and appreciated. There are a lot of people out there that write docs, but there isn’t a good place to go to find information, ask questions, and generally be a member of a community of documentarians. We hope to slowly solve this problem by building a place with high quality information about the art of writing documentation. Along with that, we hope to open communication between all the awesome people out there writing documentation.

Resources

• Online documentation: http://docs.writethedocs.org/
• Conference: http://conf.writethedocs.org/
• IRC: #writethedocs on freenode
• Twitter: http://twitter.com/writethedocs
• Mailing List: https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!forum/write-the-docs
• Issues & feature requests: https://github.com/writethedocs/docs/issues
• Source repository: https://github.com/writethedocs/docs

Building these docs

This required virtualenv. If you don’t have it installed, first run pip install virtualenv.

To build this repo locally, run:

make develop
make documentation

These docs

You have found yourself on one of the foundational aspects of the project. Inside these pages we are starting to document:

• Starting off
  • Open Source Developers
  • Developers at a company
  • Enterprise Users
• Tools for documentation writing
  • Introduction to Sphinx
• Writing documentation
  • What to write
  • Open Source basics
  • Building mindshare in a company
  • What NOT to write in documentation
  • Use doctests
• About WritetheDocs
  • Vision
  • Alternatives and related projects
  • License
  • Documentation Community
  • Authors and contributors
  • Changelog

Note

This repository is open source and is available on GitHub. We would love contributions.

The conference

We’ll be holding the first version of Write the Docs, the conference, in Portland, OR in early April 2013. This will bring together the community of documentarians into a room, for a number of reasons. We hope to help people discover a sense of community, to introduce new and interesting approaches and ideas, and generally have a meeting of the minds around documentation.

Information about Write the Docs

• Write the Docs Conference
  • Conference Information
  • Announcements