Documentation

Google Season of Docs brings together open source communities and technical writers for the benefit of both. The program raises awareness of open source, of documentation, and of technical writing. There are no current plans to participate in Google Season of Docs, but if you are curious, refer to our Google Season of Docs page for past documentation project ideas and other information.

Previously, the SIG migrated plugin documentation from the Jenkins Wiki to GitHub. Documentation in the plugin GitHub repository provides a good user experience for Jenkins users seeking documentation. By performing this migration, plugin maintainers can now follow the documentation-as-code approach and make documentation changes a part of the pull requests. It also creates an opportunity to review the documentation changes and add documentation contributor recognition, especially if the story is combined with changelog automation.

As of March 2024, we have more than 1,000 plugins which already use GitHub as a documentation source, but there are still hundreds of plugins to migrate. We invite contributors to participate in the project and to help us with migrating the docs. It is also a great opportunity to update and copy-edit the documentation.

Useful links:

The Jenkins Plugin site currently uses GitHub to get plugin documentation (see above) and tags (using GitHub topics). Release information is also pulled from GitHub releases. There are still some areas for improvement, such as parsing of CHANGELOG.md files to get release information for plugins that don’t use GitHub releases. This project was tracked in the WEBSITE-637 EPIC.

Useful links:

Jenkins user topics are included in the current Jenkins Handbook. Feedback requests are frequently received to improve user documentation. Common improvement themes include adding migration of the documentation from Wiki, pipeline examples with each of the pipeline steps, additional tutorials for new users, better searching, and navigation.

Links:

Jenkins administration topics are included in the current Jenkins Handbook. Since these topics are already included, we are not separating the administration topics into a separate volume. Upon reviewing other project documentation, very few, if any, have separate administrator guides. Due to this, we are keeping the User Handbook as it is now, where administration topics are part of the overall documentation.

Jenkins solution pages highlight specific use cases for Jenkins users. Those solutions include SCM provider solutions (GitHub, Bitbucket), programming language solutions (Python, Ruby, C/C++, Java, and PHP), and execution environment solutions (Pipeline, Docker, Embedded, and Android). An excellent opening page has been provided by Zbynek Konecny. Additional use cases and user stories are being collected by Alyssa Tong.

The appearance and navigation of those solution pages has been improved since originally starting this project. The existing pages have been revisited and improved so that users of specific solutions can find what they need on jenkins.io. This project was tracked in the WEBSITE-742 EPIC.

Meeting agendas and meeting notes for the SIG are posted in this Google Document. Anyone is welcome to add a topic for an upcoming meeting by suggesting a change in the agenda.