A new top-level handbook will be added to Drupal.org this weekend, September 27-28, titled "Getting Involved." It will appear on the main Documentation landing page. We first posted about the new book back in August and have been working hard to get everything in to place to take it live.

For the creation of the new handbook, the "Developing for Drupal" and "About" handbooks will have some sections moved into the new book. The work will be happening this weekend, so those handbooks may be in a bit of disarray during the process. We are mostly moving existing pages or creating new ones so that no URLs will be harmed. Some pages may be rewritten to reduce duplication, but we are striving to not remove any pages.

What is it?

The driving idea behind the handbook is to not only tell people how to contribute to Drupal, but also to explain why, and encourage folks to explore contributing as a great way to actually learn and make their own Drupal lives better. The new handbook will cover everything from how to get an account on Drupal.org to how to use CVS.

The major sections are:

Why Get Involved?
Get a Drupal.org account
Talk with the community
Drupal's work space: the issue queue
Report a Problem
Give feedback
Documentation
Translating
Testing
Contributing code
About CVS

How it happened

In March 2008 a number of folks got together at Drupalcon Boston to have a Documentation Sprint. We worked throughout the day to help clean up the issue queue and brainstorm. A big idea was born from that to create a new handbook that consolidates, organizes and expands the existing information we have on the myriad ways that people can get involved with the Drupal community. We wanted a guided path to ease people through the steps and put things into context. After the idea was hashed out a bit and the original proposal was put together, we had several IRC meetings to continue to refine the idea and set the outline we wanted to use. We then used the Documentation issue queue for assigning tasks to get the work done and continued to chip away over the summer. After the Documentation sprint at Drupalcon Szeged we made a final push to get the book ready. This week we had two online mini-sprints focused on the remaining tasks.

There have been many people involved in the creation of this book. This was truly a large community effort and only happened because a lot of people stepped up.

More work to do (how you can help)

The creation of the book and the reorganization is just one more step in the process. We still need to work on the new book and really make it into the resource we, as a community, need. There will need to be ongoing cleanup and finishing over the next few weeks. Everyone can still be a part of this awesome project. Other than the regular day-to-day work that everyone can help with, we have a few more specific items in sight for the Getting Involved handbook.

• Bringing disparate pages and sections together means that the flow may not be very smooth in some areas. A great help is to read through the book and then create issues in the queue with suggestions for how to improve places where ordering and/or information are confusing. (Join the documentation team to help edit directly. You can get your hands dirty and help with the editing of the book by asking to be on the team.)
• We created a number of new pages which are still incomplete. They are marked with the "Incomplete" term in the upper right-hand corner. (We are working to mark these pages more prominently.) You can either help fill them as a member of the documentation team or leave suggested text in the comments.