Managing News now has in-depth documentation complete with screenshots that covers the basics of how to install and use Managing News and more advanced tasks like how to customize and further develop on it. This work, all done by Chris Shattuck, targets everyone from new users of Managing News looking for help to get started quickly to experienced developers looking to use it as a platform for building custom sites.

Below is a walk through of some of the key documentation sections.

For new developers and users

Much of the new documentation is meant to help people get started using Managing News. The aptly named Getting Started section covers topics from what is Managing News and how to get started quickly to more advanced topics like a data architecture overview and how to implement new features.

The case studies section is a good way to get a better understanding of how you can use Managing News and helps if you’re trying to put Managing News in context for a colleague, while the basic usage section really gets into how to use core features. This section covers everything from how to add feeds to how to make use of web widgets.

For heavy customizers

If you’re looking to use Managing News as a platform or to really tweak it for your use case, the Customization and Development section is a good starting point. This section explains in detail how Managing News technically works, and what some of the inroads are for bending it to your needs.

Standardizing documentation

While Chris was working on the Managing News and Open Atrium documentation, he put together a simple tool to standardize the formatting of documentation — it’s called Beautify My Docs. If you’re writing documentation and looking to standardize the layout of your pages, this simple tool may help.