As I'm sure most of you know, Drupal 8.0.0 was released a few weeks ago (and 8.0.1 has already followed). There was much rejoicing, after several years of development!

On a slightly shorter time scale, around the end of June, the Drupal community (especially documentation folks) started working on making a User Guide for Drupal 8, and now seems to be a great time to get it finished. The project has made considerable progress: we have defined what topics need to be written, and first drafts of 53 of the 99 topics have been written, with another 14 or so in progress.

But there is more to do, and we need your help to get the User Guide done!

Individual Writers and Editors

Individual writers and editors can contribute to the User Guide effort by either writing a topic or editing someone else's writing. A single topic is about a page long, so it's not a huge project to write one, and all you need is the ability to write coherently in English and some basic Drupal skills. You can pick a topic to write in your area of expertise, or stretch yourself by picking something you know less about, and use the topic writing as a learning exercise. To get started, check out the contributor guide (login: drupal/drupal), which will guide you in picking a topic to work on. There are also several editing projects ready to go, and there will be more going forward.

The rewards: you'll get your name (and your company's name and URL, if you wish) in the Attributions list of the User Guide, and earn the gratitude of all the readers. Plus, you'll have the satisfaction of having contributed to something the Drupal project has long needed.

Conference and Sprint Organizers

If you're organizing a conference with a sprint day, a local meetup for the Drupal Global Sprint Weekend in January, or another type of sprint, you may be trying to figure out how to provide all your attendees with something useful to do. I'd just like to point out that writing topics for the User Guide is a great way to involve non-programmers in contributing to the Drupal project.

If you're interested in hosting a User Guide sprint, check out the contributor guide link in the previous section for details on what this type of contributing entails. There are generic guides to hosting sprints available on Drupal.org too -- see https://www.drupal.org/node/1503220

Also, several members of the Documentation group have organized User Guide sprints at conferences over the past few months, so if you have questions about how to have a successful sprint, feel free to post them as comments here.

Let's get this Guide done!