Six Reasons To Get A Handbook Page For Your Module

Checkout view being currently disabled in ViewVC is a very good opportunity to remind everyone that linking to your README.txt file in CVS does not count as documentation on your project page!

Here are some things I, or anyone else, can do with a proper documentation page in what used to be called the handbooks section of drupal.org:

• Correct it.
• Expand on it.
• Clarify things for newbies.
• Add a section listing modules that works with yours that users might be interested to know about, thus helping a tiny tiny bit to make sense of the Big Lego Box.
• Share some of the things I've done to theme your module.
• Add to a section on troubleshooting, and hopefully keep some of the more recurring issues out of your queue (or at least give you somewhere to point to in slightly self-righteous manner ;)

In short, with a little bit of seeding (some basic explanations of the concepts of your module and some instructions), you open it up to a whole community of potential writers and editors. Which is a concept we should all be familiar with!

If you say that keeping a documentation book page in sync with your CVS readme file is too much of a hassle (and who said it should be in sync anyway?) then it's because you've not thought about the benefits.