One of the things I learned last weekend at woscon09, was the importance of planning when beginning to write documentation.

With that in mind, and the GNOME Documentation Project’s focus on moving to topic based documentation, the goal of writing docs for Banshee is to answer the question “How do I…?” for users.

So let’s kick off writing the first ever integrated help file for Banshee!

Knowing that, have you come across any forum posts, blog posts, information on a wiki, or howto’s about Banshee? Do you know a trick or tip about Banshee most people might not know? You needn’t have written it, I’m just looking for links. If you have some to share, please leave a comment on my blog. (I have an over-aggressive spam filter, but I’ll be actively monitoring it).

I’ve brainstormed my own topics for user help, and have the start of a table of contents, but I’d love this to be a community effort. As I see good information out in the community, my goal is to contact the author and see if they’re willing to help with Banshee docs. The Banshee documentation will be one of the first help documents in GNOME to move to a CC-SA 3.0 license, and if the authors want to help, that’s the only requirement. CC-SA 3.0 automatically gives attribution as well.

My last goal is to write the Banshee docs in Mallard, now that support support for Mallard is in GNOME 2.27. And if you want to help, don’t be intimated by that! We’ll do the markup for you if you’re new to GNOME docs and have good information to share!

I’ve started a docs branch on the Banshee repository on Gitorious which is where active development will take place.

And speaking of attribution, I can’t take credit for this idea. A big thank you to Emma at woscon09 last weekend for encouraging me to get the community involved.

So what topics do you think should be in the Banshee help file? What information about Banshee have you come across on the internet that should be shared with other users?