Documentation

The EU-FOSSA hackathon allowed us to, for the first time ever, gather 4 of the doc team members together to work on the documentation. Also, by combining the doc team with all code contributors, we managed to help code contributors to write doc PRs for their contributions. Being able to directly help people understand the reStructuredText syntax and logics of writing docs was a huge help to get more features documented.

This resulted in a diverse set of achievements. Below is a short summary of all work done, but please have a look at all GitHub issues and pull requests handled during the weekend.

Documenting Features that were Missing for Years

While Symfony puts lots of effort into documenting all new features, it cannot be avoided that sometimes great features are missed. During the weekend, new undocumented features were discovered in discussions between contributors and time finally was found to add some more articles.

Among this, @Toflar worked on documenting the changes in .env files in Symfony 4.2 While the recommendations changed (from .env.dist to .env.local), the docs were never updated accordingly.

@Nyholm combined the knowledge of almost everyone around to write a brand new Cache guide. As the component has changed quite often and involved many code contributors, we’re very happy there was finally an occasion where the documentors and code contributors could combine their knowledge about this topic. This will be a great help for all future users of caching in Symfony!

At last, @heahdude started all enthousiasm this weekend by creating documentation for the Traverse constraint. This constraint was introduced in Symfony 2.5 (that’s 5 years ago!) and I’m not sure if anyone knew it even existed. Great to find this feature and have it documented now!

Finishing old Pull Requests

The documentation has around 100 open PRs, most of which are open for months or even years. During the hackathon, developers were encouraged to finish these old PRs. @llaakkkk worked on finishing a new article on Message Transports, @Toflar finished adding Doctrine ORM installation instructions, and some more old PRs were closed and fixed by doc team members with the help of @dbrumann, who focussed on the docs during the complete hackathon.

Documenting new Features

During the second day, the docs corner became quite busy, as all developers that created new features on the first day wanted to directly document them. “A feature does not exist without documentation” became reality this weekend! In total, 39 different authors created 61 pull requests during the weekend!

The Hackathon ended, the Contributions did not!

The hackathon gave all participants lots of positive energy, something that became obvious during the days after the hackathon. The stream of new PRs continued to be impressively high, with over 24 new pull requests created on Monday (that almost equals the achievements of the hackathon!). As new contributors have learned how to document their features, our hopes are high that the documentation will receive more help from all contributors in the future!