What a couple of weeks!  I'm suffering from complete information and inspiration overload from SXSW and OSCMS.  Hopefully I'll eventually find the time to finish the posts I started during SXSW, but for now you'll have to settle for this rant about moving the Drupal Handbooks to wikis and seperating them from the general forums and issues. 

My presentation about teaching non-developers enough development to understand database driven web design went well, but I was competing against some sessions for an audience I would have rather been at so I was talking to a small group of primarily designers.  There is real feeling of frustration being expressed by the designers who attended OSCMS that there isn't good Drupal documentation for designers.  I started talking to Steven Peck about the need to have different handbooks for different user groups and that the community has out grown the one size fits all Handbook.  Steven wasn't opposed to this, but I didn't get to ask my follow up which is why isn't the Handbook a wiki?

The information about TinyMCE in the Handbook isn't that great and is difficult to find using Drupal's search.  One suggestion was to use the advanced search options available on Drupal.org and limit the search to books.  I can do that, but it is ridiculous to expect new users to deal with that.
A Google Search for "drupal tinymce handbook" gets me the content I'm looking for, but the content itself is outdated, poorly written, and I don't have premission to update it.  I'm guessing if I asked Steven for permissions he'd give it to me, but how many edits would be suggestd to Wikipedia if you had to ask to make an edit.   Users try to update the content in the comments, but that is difficult to follow. 

I would really like to see non developer documentation in seperate handbook that doesn't link to every other page of documentation ever written.  It's just overwhelming to new users.

When a user searches for "tinymce" on Drupal.org, they get results that appear to be completely random...

1. A Forum topic from ufku about IMCE from 10/08/2006
2. An Issue from xjm about source formatting options from 10/03/2007
3. The module project page I updated in 26/02/2007
4. A Forum topic from Andrew Thomas about an install problem from 25/08/2006
5. A Forum topic from walterbyrd stating that TinyMCE simply doesn't work from 24/01/2007

Page after page of Forum Topics from users needing support. I simply don't have time to monitor the general Forum for TinyMCE specific questions. Can someone explain why every project doesn't have it's own support forum?
Finally on page 6 you actually find some documentation. A book page about "Customising the full page layout and sections based on path" Dublin Drupaller wrote in 08/09/2006.

This whole process seems completely unintuitive to me...

• Documentation in the form of Handbooks are buried by forum posts
• The Handbooks are book pages individuals own that aren't tagged by difficulty (Getting started, customizing your install, advanced options).
• Users try to correct the documentation in comments vs. correcting it as a wiki

I'd really like to see a wiki version of the seperated from the rest of Drupal.org and with their own search to a site like handbooks.drupal.org.  The we should define some basic user type taxonomy and write support documentation specific to those audiences.  There is already an effort to create developer documentation for new developers in the Google SoC program who need to get up to speed quickly that is outside of the Handbooks.  The Dojo efforts are also outside of the Handbooks.  I think both of these efforts would be more helpful to more people if the Handbook framework was changed.  

During Julian's Tschannen session he talked about his effort to get diff module included in core.  I think transitioning hanbooks to wikis on a new handbooks.drupal.org would be a great way to make happen.