MDN Work Week-end
Category Developer Documentation
URL https://wiki.mozilla.org/MDN/Work_Weekends
Description The MDN Team and a set of MDN core and new contributors will meet in Paris to work on how to improve MDN. Remote participation is possible and welcome.
Blogposts
Documentation work
- Prototyped new UX for the MDN App Center.
- All KumaScript errors on every page in the English, German, and French locales were resolved! This is a huge deal and I’m grateful to Jean-Yves, Florian, and Sphinx for this work.
- Lots of work was done to sketch out and plan an improved onboarding experience for new contributors.
- Lots of new Web documentation was added for various CSS properties, as well as for the HTML element used by Web Components.
- Over 100 pages of beginner content were properly tagged to be easier to find using MDN’s search filters.
- Planning work for the new MDN “Learning” area was done; this area will provide content for new Web and Web app developers. Work to plan out requirements for future MDN events was done.
- Planning for the next steps of the compatibility data project was done. We will be building a system for maintaining a database, in essence, of compatibility for all the things that make up the Web, then updating our compatibility tables to be constructed from that database. This database will also be queryable.
- Progress was made on documenting the Web Audio API. Thanks to Scott Michaud for his work on this.
- Chris Heilmann worked on adding live samples to pages; his work included some experiments in ways to make them more interactive, and he talked with our dev team about an improved user interface for implementing live samples.
Kuma platform work
Seven new people had the Kuma build system set up on their computers, with a virtual machine running a Kuma server up and running. Those seven people included me. In fact, I devised and submitted three patches to the Kuma platform over the weekend! They’re nothing particularly big, but it did allow closing three longstanding minor bugs. Not a big deal, but I’m proud of that anyway.
And I’m not the only one: a ton of amazing enhancements to the Kuma platform were developed over the weekend. Some are already deployed; others will not be for a while, since there are quirks to iron out.
- Live samples are now better delineated by having a border drawn around them (this one is mine, and already deployed).
- A new JavaScript snippet has been developed that can be embedded into any Web site to automatically link common terms to the appropriate pages on MDN.
- A bunch of old code we inherited from the Kitsune project has been removed (Ricky did this).
- The email sent to admins after a page move operation is completed has been enhanced to include a link to the new location and to have the subject be more specific as to which move finished (another of mine; not yet deployed but probably will go out in the next push).
- The “revert this page” confirmation prompt has some wording corrections (mine, and pushed to production).
- A new “top contributors” widget has been developed; this will show the top three contributors to a page, with their avatar image, at the top of the page somewhere. This isn’t finished but the prototype is promising. This work was done primarily by Luke Crouch, I believe.
- UX design work was done for future enhancements to how we display search results.
- UX design work was done for how we display the language list, to improve discoverability both of the fact that there are multiple languages, but also that pages can be localized by contributors.
- The revision diff page you get when comparing two pages in an article’s history now includes a “Revert to this revision” button.
- Lots of design and planning work for improved search UX, filtering, and more. This stuff will amaze you when it lands!
13 attending, including...
