1196772 - Would be nice to have a "new Mozilla developer" tag for docs

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Developer Documentation Graveyard :: Mozilla Platform, defect)

Description

[Andrew Overholt [:overholt]]

Jean-Yves' WebIDL overview page [1] is a great example of the type of documentation I'd like to see tagged/collected for developers new to the Mozilla project.  We could point new contributors to the documentation as part of some sort of onboarding.

[1]
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/MDN/Contribute/Howto/Write_an_API_reference/Information_contained_in_a_WebIDL_file

Comment 1

[Eric Shepherd [:sheppy]]

I like this idea very much.

There are a couple of things to think about:

1. Would it be enough to simply tag pages with "Beginner" and "Mozilla" and use those two tags together to mean this? My feeling is "no" because some pages that are not necessarily Mozilla-specific will be in this category.

2. What do we call this tag? MozillaIntro? MozOnboarding? Mozilla Intro? Lots of options! Would love ideas.

Comment 2

[Justin Crawford [:hoosteeno] [:jcrawford]]

I think the precedent is "Introduction":

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Introduction

"If you have any difficulties getting involved or finding answers to your questions, please bring those questions to the #introduction chat room on irc.mozilla.org so that we can help you get started."

Comment 3

[Andrew Overholt [:overholt]]

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/tag/Developing%20Mozilla could also work ... maybe that + Introduction for the getting started pages?

Comment 4

[Eric Shepherd [:sheppy]]

(In reply to Andrew Overholt [:overholt] from comment #3)
> https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/tag/Developing%20Mozilla could also
> work ... maybe that + Introduction for the getting started pages?

That's a good idea; just using "Introduction" + "Developing Mozilla" would get the set of pages we're looking for.

What I'd like to do is create a page in the https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/ hierarchy which would use those tags to generate a menu of articles of use to new Mozilla contributors. This is the joy of KumaScript in action. :)

On top of that, you can even use the "Featured" tag to mark a page as needing to be put in a fancy callout box at the top of the page (there can be up to three), and "Important" to cause a page to be pulled out of alphabetic order and moved to the top of the list (if there's more than one "Important" article, they're independently alphabetized above everything else).

Given all of that, all that's needed is the content and the tagging.

:overholt -- if there are existing articles that you or others on your team feel are helpful or must-read pages for new developers, please feel free to tag them up, or at least ask us to do it.

If we're agreed on how this should work, I can set aside a few minutes tonight or tomorrow to create the page (it's very very easy).

Comment 5

[Eric Shepherd [:sheppy]]

Any further discussion or input? If nobody objects to the plan as laid out in comment #4, I'll build the page in the next couple days.

Comment 6

[Andrew Overholt [:overholt]]

This all sounds good to me!  Thanks!

Comment 7

[Eric Shepherd [:sheppy]]

After much fiddling, I have created a macro (

Then I added this new page: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_guide/Articles_for_new_developers

Every six hours, this page automatically updates itself to list any pages under /en-US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_guide which have the tag "Introduction". The list is sorted alphabetically, with one exception: any pages also tagged "Important" are shuffled to the top of the list (in alphabetical order, but before the items without the "Important" tag).

You don't need to make any changes to the "Articles for new developers" page; just tag the pages you want to show up on the list.

You can force the "new developers" page to rebuild immediately by shift-refreshing while viewing it and while logged into MDN.

Closing this bug as fixed. Let me know if there are any problems!