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Have Your Say: What Areas of Rails Need Better Documentation?

By Peter Cooper / February 19, 2007

If you were in the Rails community six months ago, you might remember the Caboose Rails Documentation Project, a drive to raise $5,000 USD to spend on improving the Rails documentation. It turns out they actually ended up with $15,000 due to the overwhelming support of the community, but the process got mired in debate about what to do with the cash.

No matter, though, as things are now moving and Jamie van Dyke has been hired for one day per week to work on Rails documentation. Jamie is now looking for ideas from the community on what he should be working on specifically. He wants to know what parts of Rails are severely lacking in documentation coverage. So, help him out and give him your opinions.

Comments

  1. Ian Ozsvald says:

    I have posted a comment over at FearOfFish saying that ShowMeDo.com would be very happy to host freely-available tutorial screencasts for Ruby/Rails.
    Our Python tutorial section is growing nicely (75+ videos now), Ruby has just 5 (!) and we'd love to see that improve.
    We'll be hosting much of the video material for the upcoming PyCon annual Python conference, I'd love to see us host as much Ruby/Rails material as we expect to get for projects like TurboGears and Django.
    Regards,
    Ian (co-founder ShowMeDo.com)

  2. Eric Schultz says:

    One of the most notable issues that I've noticed is OpenSSL in the standard library is almost totally undocumented. Its sorta due to the fact that RDoc needs a patch to correctly access it (if you need the details just ask, I've looked into it) but it just seems like nobody has made an effort to clear up what the damn thing does. I know there have been a few other things but I can't think of them right now. I might be back later when I remember.

  3. Charlie bowman says:

    why is there no action over at railsbook.org? Atleast create a content page right? what's the holdup? railsbook.org could be a great open source book!

  4. jeroen says:

    It's currently hard (impossible?) to tell which API is 1.1 and which is 1.2 (or edge) only.
    I'd like to see more docs on the RESTful features
    I also like to see a different page layout. I really don't care much about the "files" and "methods" frames, I always use the classes. I'd be nice if I could have the whole left frame for "classes" and have the website remember that preference.

  5. Jack Givens says:

    I will also echo the lack of good SSL documentation. This is an important area for business that would be great to see more doc coverage.

    Thanks, Jack

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