The main focus of the April 2025 Melbourne Drupal Meetup was improving Drupal's documentation ecosystem through community contributions. Vladimir demonstrated the current challenges with finding documentation on drupal.org and showed live examples of editing both community guides and API documentation. The session provided practical guidance for developers looking to contribute to the Drupal project, while also featuring a community discussion about the proposed marketplace initiative.
Contributing to Drupal documentation – a summary
Drupal's documentation ecosystem faces significant accessibility and maintenance challenges that frustrate both new and experienced developers. Vladimir highlighted how finding documentation on drupal.org requires navigating through multiple menus or scrolling to page footers, while much of the existing content contains outdated references and deprecated code examples.
Contributing to documentation offers a practical way for developers to give back to the Drupal community while improving resources they use in their daily work. Vladimir demonstrated live editing of both community guides and API documentation, showing how developers can address gaps they encounter during real project work rather than making theoretical improvements.
Why Drupal documentation is hard to find
Vladimir demonstrated the difficulty in locating documentation on Drupal by contrasting Drupal's approach with frameworks like Bootstrap, where "docs" appears as the primary menu item. Even for experienced users, Drupal's documentation links appear scattered across different sections, with some accessible through user profiles and others buried in project-specific areas.
The navigation challenges extend beyond simple link placement to fundamental issues affecting user experience. First-time visitors to drupal.org face overwhelming choices without clear pathways to documentation, while the "Learn about Drupal CMS" section doesn't obviously connect to comprehensive developer resources. This accessibility problem contributes to valuable documentation remaining underutilised despite containing helpful information.
Two types of documentation contributions
Vladimir outlined two distinct pathways for improving Drupal documentation, each with different workflows and requirements. Community guides exist as standalone pages on drupal.org that can be edited directly through the web interface, while API documentation lives within core code files and requires traditional contribution processes through issue queues and code commits.
Community guides offer the most accessible entry point for documentation contributions. Vladimir demonstrated live editing of REST API guides, showing how contributors can immediately update outdated version references and fix deprecated code examples. However, new pages require maintainer approval to appear in guide menus, creating potential bottlenecks for comprehensive updates.
API documentation provides more direct impact on developer workflows since it appears alongside function definitions and class references. Vladimir showed how his previous core contributions added practical code examples to the file system interface documentation, making these resources more useful for developers implementing specific functionality. These contributions require following standard core development processes but result in documentation that stays closely aligned with actual code implementation.
Practical approaches to improving Drupal documentation
Vladimir recommended starting with documentation related to current work projects rather than attempting broad improvements across unfamiliar topics. His REST API documentation work emerged from investigating the functionality for a client website, ensuring contributions address real-world usage scenarios. This approach helps identify genuine gaps where examples don't work or explanations lack clarity.
Teaching and training contexts offer excellent opportunities for improving documentation. Vladimir's experience as an instructor revealed documentation quality issues when preparing materials for students and corporate training programs. The test becomes whether newcomers can follow the documentation independently and achieve successful outcomes without additional guidance.
While AI tools like ChatGPT can provide starting points for documentation examples, Vladimir cautioned about their limitations with current Drupal practices. He demonstrated how generated code often uses outdated annotation methods or incorrect formatting, requiring careful review and updating. The most reliable approach combines AI-generated drafts with thorough verification against current Drupal standards and testing in real implementations.
Community discussion on the Drupal marketplace initiative
Pamela from Technocrat led a community discussion about the Drupal Association's recently announced marketplace initiative for site templates. The proposed marketplace would offer composer packages that include custom themes and additional functionality through recipes, with some templates potentially available for purchase rather than solely as open source contributions.
After mixed reactions, Pamela clarified that modules will definitively remain free and open source, with only theme assets and display elements potentially subject to licensing. The initiative aims to make Drupal more accessible to users who cannot develop custom themes while creating revenue streams for the Drupal Association to support infrastructure improvements.
Conclusion
Vladimir's session demonstrated that improving Drupal documentation doesn't require extensive technical writing experience or deep subject matter expertise across all topics. His practical approach of addressing documentation gaps encountered during real project work ensures contributions solve actual problems while building contributor confidence through familiar territory. The live editing demonstrations showed how both community guides and API documentation can be improved through direct, incremental changes that collectively strengthen the entire Drupal ecosystem.