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escoles@drupal.org's picture
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This is the feature I'd like to request:

A book.

A literal, dead-tree (or baked-bits, I don't care), honest-to-goodness BOOK.

I know developers don't want to screw around with that nonsense. I get that. But Ubercart is moving so fast (3.0 when 2.0 is barely outta beta??) and it's hard to find solid, approachable documentation of important things like conditional actions -- we don't really know, canonically, as implementers, how all this stuff is SUPPOSED to work. We have to ask the developers. I see that a lot in questions here: We make assumptions, you tell us no it's not actually supposed to work that way, we say 'oh.'

Thing is, Ubercart has such powerful potential, but it's getting overshadowed by the e-commerce module (which basically has its own book, BTW).

I know you guys are busy building new features, and that documentation is probably not what you want to be doing. As I've said, I get that. So maybe you can reach out to one of the folks who's already writing about Drupal and get them to work with you?

Just thoughts, obviously. I do know it's not as easy as this could be construed as making it sound. I just think it's something you should consider.

wbclassics's picture
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Joined: 01/25/2009
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Re: "Feature Request" (unorthodox)

Expanding and improving the documentation really should be a higher priority, especially before moving onto UC3, IMO.

Ryan's picture
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Joined: 08/07/2007
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Re: "Feature Request" (unorthodox)

hehe Fun thread, and I appreciate your enthusiasm. Personally, this is something I haven't really considered given the current state of the Ubercart code. My goal has been to get to Ubercart 3.x when I expect the core project to be a lot more mature and worth writing about. Obviously, if anyone else wants to give it a go, I'd be more than happy to write a preface and do some editing. Eye-wink

fwiw, anyone here can edit and add documentation to the handbooks. I know that doesn't replace the dedicated time and effort of a single author with plenty of experience doing a knowledge-dump in a book, but it should help us get some more decent documentation quicker.

tcindie@drupal.org's picture
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Getting busy with the Ubercode.
Joined: 05/15/2008
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Re: Re: "Feature Request" (unorthodox)

While I agree an Ubercart development book would be great (and I'd even be interested in penning at least a portion of it) I agree with Ryan's sentiment that such a book would be a little bit premature until a good deal of the kinks are worked out of the system and the code matures a little bit more.

I mean after all, it's not terribly unlikely that UC3.x will drastically change large sections of the core code, and how modules go about interacting with the various pieces of data, hooks, and whatnot. Given the time it would take to write a proper book, a helpful and useful book, waiting a bit longer until uc3 development is underway to begin working on such a publication would probably be the best bet.

In the meantime, the forum and irc are great resources for getting development questions answered. Eye-wink

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