Documentation for Open Atrium — our open source intranet in a box platform — has recently seen significant additions and improvements, including new docs on getting started, configuration, customization and development, and key modules. This comes on the heels of our documentation sprint in May where we added new or updated documentation on 15 different topics. This time Chris Shattuck led up the work, focusing on adding documentation on new topics, updating existing resources, and making it all more usable with screenshots and better formatting and organization.

New documentation

One area we wanted to improve was documentation for new users. The Quick Start Guide helps newbies get up and running fast, walking through how to install Open Atrium to how to actually use it. We also added a section of Case Studies that includes examples of it in use as a corporate intranet, a public facing community site, and a project management tool. We hope this section helps illustrate the different ways that Open Atrium can be used and serve as a useful resource for folks wanting to explain this to others.

A lot of the new documentation was created based on support requests that have come in through the Open Atrium issue tracker. Using common questions as a starting point, we expanded on Frequently Asked Question sections, adding ones for general question, configuration-related questions, and customization and development questions.

Features, Context, and Boxes modules

If you do not use Open Atrium but do use Drupal modules like Features, Context, and Boxes, there is documentation that you may find useful. These modules are core parts of Open Atrium, and we developed detailed documentation explaining how they are used in the platform. Additions include how Contexts work, what are Blocks and how do they work, and what are Features and how Features help.

Other improvements

In addition to the new documentation, we updated several documents and sections to include more details, screenshots, and better organization. Specifically the Customization and Development chapter is now more thorough and includes information on Open Atrium’s overall architecture, a guide for how to customize Open Atrium, and examples of customizations that have been made.

Big improvements were also made to documentation explaining how to translate Open Atrium, and this documentation is now included with all the documentation.

Contribute

We welcome all contributors of documentation for Open Atrium. To help with this process Chris put together style guides covering screenshot use, document formatting, and other documentation pointers. You can check this out in Contribute to Open Atrium: Documentation. All documentation for Open Atrium is available at community.openatrium.com

A big thanks again to Chris Shattuck for contributing this new documentation!