Deki is a rich platform for developing applications based on its database, and we're not yet taking advantage of all the possibilities. Here's a place to brainstorm about things that we could be doing using extensions.
- Integration with blogs
- Searches should work across both MDC and the devmo and web-tech blogs.
- Some form of automation for converting blog posts into MDC articles?
- How about a way for bloggers to easily locate articles that might be relevant "see also" mentions in their posts?
- Integration with Bugzilla
- Ability to show bugs related to a topic area
- Ability to display bug statistics for releases
- Automatic tracking of tasks that need to be done
- Lists of missing articles, both overall and in categories?
- Articles that need technical review.
- Articles that need editorial review.
- Articles that need translating or updates to their translations.
- Matching of contributors with needed content
- Maybe offer a questionnaire that contributors can fill out specifying their areas of interest and expertise.
- Use that information to suggest articles that need technical review or writing from scratch that might interest the contributor.
- Metrics to help us better coordinate with the community and improve documentation evangelism
- How many contributors per language?
- What kinds of material are contributed by Mozilla employees as compared to volunteers?
- Performance improvements
- Use offline resources to cache skin and script files to improve site performance.
- Improved offline availability
- Custom "books" by selecting articles and batch downloading them as a PDF or set of HTML files?
- Encouraging contributions
- How about implementing a Warcraft-like system of achievements to make contributing more fun?
- Stuff like "first contribution," "fifth contribution," etc.
- "Fixed a doc bug"
- Someone voted your article up
- Maybe badges for different cool things you did
- That kind of thing
- So, something like SO's badges? --SamB 18 January 2011
- Similarly, how about a system of documentation "quests" to make things more interesting
- Could offer a dashboard to let people show off their contributions
- How about implementing a Warcraft-like system of achievements to make contributing more fun?
- Offer a page that lets contributors see what sorts of failed searches so they can find topics to address
- A page that lists, say, 10 random articles to check each week, or a feed that does a daily "take a look at this article".
- Offer a way for comments on articles to include metadata such as "this should be migrated into the main article."
- XUL samples could be displayed live in-page using an iframe.
- Improved discoverability
- Contributors need a way to easily locate subject-matter experts for topics, so they can ask questions while writing content.
- Update main page to be less cluttered and more a guide to how to find what you need.
- Move articles around to put them into a proper hierarchy for better organization and discoverability.
- <strike>Add a widget to each article that offers links to appropriate IRC channels for discussing that article's content. </strike>
- <strike>Can do this using the article's tags; for example, articles tagged with "XUL" would point at #xul, articles tagged with "Extensions" would point at #extdev, articles tagged with "JavaScript" would point at #js, and so forth.</strike>