"CVS Instructions" tab now available for all Drupal.org projects
“CVS Instructions” tab on the Author Taxonomy module
Drupal’s CVS is now more user-friendly!
As part of the Documentation Sprint at Drupalcon DC 2009, web chef David Strauss built a “CVS Instructions” tab for Drupal.org. The tab provides concise, step-by-step instructions on how to check out, commit, patch, tag, and branch any module or theme. A simple drop-down box at the top of the page allows the user to select the version of the module or theme they want to work with, and the instructions are updated to display exact, copy-and-pastable commands.
Here’s an example of the CVS Instructions tab for the 6.x-1.x branch of Author Taxonomy.
This tiny feature represents a huge step forward in Drupal’s approach to opening its doors to contributors of all skill levels. This is especially important for those designers among us, many of whom cannot contribute themes — something Drupal sorely lacks — because they do not understand Drupal’s arcane CVS or command-line interaction in general. At Drupalcon DC, we designers pledged to learn and use the developer-oriented tools used by the Drupal community — namely IRC and CVS. Simple steps like the “CVS Instructions” tab move mountains for those who would otherwise give up and not contribute anything at all.
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Comments
I just want to give a serious shout-out for this magic. It is brilliant! Thanks to David (and the others at the coder table) for working on docs on sprint day. See, folks, coders can help docs too. ;-)
This is an amazing contribution. It may seem like a ‘tiny feature’ to you but this will save many people hours of fumfering around trying to locate and construct the proper command lines. Way to go!
And thanks… you’ve just made my life so much easier. Maybe now i’ll maintain my modules more like they should be!
I’m already finding this amazingly useful. It’s so great to not have to search through the docs to find the right CVS commands.
It was a lot of fun being part of the coder table with you at Drupalcon. It’s amazing how much our little table got done!
Yes, and thanks Julia for finding and documenting the CVS commands. :-)
Yes, very good work on the part of everyone who helped with this. A little scary to consider how much contributions might proliferate because of this type of help - but that’s a good problem to have. :-)
All I can say is Thank you to everyone involved! This was sorely needed. Focused docs for the task at hand… Major win!
Huge kudos! This tab helps out even people like me who are lazy to remember CVS commands for contrib and would always use google to find the cut and paste commands in the handbooks when I need to check out contrib modules. Typing in 100-120 chars by memory is a recipe to failure anyway :)
Love it. Well done!