Day two of the CiviCRM book sprint - developer documentation in alpha!

It's 5 to midnight and we're just wrapping up. Mr Kurund says that I can't go to bed until I've written this post, so... Participating in the second book sprint is just as fascinating as it was the first time around, but the dynamic is definitely different. Having a book in place already makes a big difference - there's no panicking that we'll end up with the sections half finished, and it is easier to cover components when a lot of the design decisions have already been made. Having already written sections on the components is especially helpful when covering new components. Today we reached some pretty huge milestones - we have full draft coverage of CiviCRM's two newest components: CiviCase and CiviReport, and also of the new Drupal module for CiviCRM: CiviEngage. And if that weren't enough, we've also have a comprehensive draft of a new section 'Developing with CiviCRM' that covers best practice for extending Civi. Developer documenation is often requested on the forums and at meet ups, trainings, etc. so we are hopeful that this will be really useful to the community. Developer documentation was only just on the roadmap before this sprint but given the mix of people in the room, it made a lot of sense to write it. It's great that the book sprint model allows us to take advantage of the interests and skills of people in the room. It seems to me that there are a lot of parallels in this second sprint with code refactoring. We've abstracted a template for covering components based on our experinces in version 1, and we are also using this to provide a general structure to the book. We're also doing a fair amount of 'code clean up' in the earlier sections. There's still lots to keep us busy for the last two days, including a major rewrite of CiviEvent, adding fuller coverage of CiviMail and finalising the rewrite of the initial sections.