MDN "meta-documentation" archive

Here you'll find archived "meta-documentation"; that is, documentation about how to write documentation on MDN. The articles here are obsolete and should no longer be referenced; we are retaining them here for reference while we migrate some content to new places, but very little of this is useful.

Article page layout guide

An article is any page that explains or teaches something. These are non-reference pages which are also not landing pages. In general, if a page is primarily prose and/or sample code, it's an article.

Blog posts to integrate into documentation

Often, Mozilla developers and community members write blog posts. And often, those blog posts are really, really awesome. And, often, those blog posts include information that really ought to be included on MDN. Sometimes, it's the entire blog post that could be adapted into a tutorial on MDN (but please check with the author first, unless they're known to have given blanket permission!), and other times, there are just details about changes to Firefox or web technologies that we need to be sure are reflected in the right places in the docs.

Canvas documentation improvements

The goal of this project is to thoroughly revamp our existing canvas and 2D rendering context documentation, including both the reference material and tutorials/guides, by finding, organizing, cleaning up, and updating existing documentation, adding new documentation to cover features not yet documented, and adding new and useful examples that use the live sample system.

Current events

Custom CSS classes for MDN

The following are the custom CSS classes that we have defined for the Devmo wiki. If, for whatever reason, you need a custom class defined in the CSS for this wiki, feel free to contact the documentation team lead.

Design Document

DevEdge

This is a temporary Index of the content that has been migrated from DevEdge to this wiki. The original list and mirror are linked below.

Developer documentation process

In order to improve the quality of our documentation, and our ability to coordinate among the various members of the Mozilla documentation community, we have a process by which documentation is maintained. This article describes how this works and offers useful links to help you ensure that the work you do is as helpful and useful as possible to the community of Web and Mozilla developers.

Disambiguation

Disambiguation in the MDC wiki is the process of resolving ambiguity, referring to the conflicts that occur when articles about two or more different topics have the same "natural" title.

Documentation Wishlist

Is there a specific article or piece of documentation we're missing that you really wish we had? Add it to the list below. Unless you're sure there is no documentation on the topic you're interested in, please ask in the relevant newsgroup and/or on the MDC mailing list first. Also, please make your request easy to understand; add a link to a longer description of the request if needed.

Documentation planning and tracking

We are in the process of trying to use scrumbugs to track documentation from the point at which the bug is filed through prioritization, assignment to a writer, and eventual completion. This page will cover some details of how we use it.

Editing MDN pages

This page describes some common tasks when editing MDN pages.

Examples

Existing Content/DOM in Mozilla

< MDC:Existing Content

External Redirects

The MDC wikis have the ability to redirect to external websites. We have done this so we can have links to external pages within the wiki that will be included in the wiki category pages.

Finding the right place to document bugs

Bugzilla is big. Really really big. MDN is big too. This page helps to put two big things together. It:

Getting started as a new MDN contributor

The Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) is a wiki, where anyone can add and edit content. You don't need to be a programmer or an expert on the latest technology. There is a wide range of tasks that need to be done, ranging from the simple, such as proofreading and correcting typos, to the more complex, like writing API documentation.

Landing page layout guide

A landing page serves as a menu, of sorts, for all of its subpages. It opens with a brief summary of the topic, then presents a structured list of links to subpages, and, optionally, additional material that may be of use.

MDN content on WebPlatform.org

Web Platform Docs (WPD) is a site for documentation and education about Web standards, run by W3C and supported by Mozilla, among others. Anyone is welcome to contribute content from MDN to WebPlatform.org, under the terms of MDN's Creative Commons Share-Alike 2.5 (CC-BY-SA) license. Content that originates from MDN must be attributed to MDN, with a link to the source article. The Web Platform Docs site provides support for doing this in a systematic way.

MDN page layout guide

These guides supplement the MDN style guide with specific layouts for the various types of pages on MDN. This helps contributors create new content that's structurally consistent with the rest of MDN.

MDN subproject list

In order to turn the work of building documentation of All Things Open Web (not to mention All Things Mozilla) into something less daunting, sometimes it's helpful to split it up into subprojects. This page offers a list of links to MDN subproject organizational content.

Needs Redirect

If you have

Page types

Before working on the MDN style guide (and the redesign that goes hand-in-hand with it), we need to figure out what types of pages we have, then what those pages look like. This is a list of the types of pages and key attributes of those pages.

RecRoom documentation plan

RecRoom is the codename of a new MDN area that will provide resources for beginning Web app developers, as well as overall best practices guides for app development.

Remove in-content iframes

Each of the documents listed below has at least one in-place use of the <iframe> element within it. In order to improve performance and allow us to more easily revise and correct layout in the future, we need to quickly update all of these pages to use macros instead.  This is somewhat urgent, as there is work that needs to be done by our development team that cannot begin until all of these are fixed. That's where you come in!

Team status board

This table is a list of MDN contributors and what they're currently working on. Feel free to add yourself and what you're up to to this list, but keep in mind that we will purge out-of-date entries regularly, so if you choose to add yourself, do your best to keep your information current (even if all you do is update the "last updated" so we know you're keeping it current, despite your work taking a long time to finish).

Using the Mozilla Developer Center

Welcome to the Mozilla Developer Center! Here you'll find documentation for not only working on the code and other components of the Mozilla project, but also for developing add-ons for Mozilla-based software, creating new software based on Mozilla code, and web development for the open Web.

Welcome to the Mozilla Developer Network

The Mozilla Developer Network is the most comprehensive and accurate resource for Web development, as written by you, the developers.

Writing chrome code documentation plan

We need a good guide to writing chrome JavaScript code. This plan proposes a project to produce that documentation.

Writing content

There are always things that can be added or updated on MDN. Whether it's all-new documentation for a sparkling new API or a revision to an older API that's changed subtly, you'll find lots of opportunities to help.