The user documentation is great for looking up what you already know. Finding your way when you don't know yet is harder. That is what tutorials are for: step by step, you do something and see it work.
Last year we wrote tutorials for people who have a Joomla site. This year it's for people who want to build one. Each tutorial introduces one of the concepts you work with when building a site with Joomla:
- template styles and your own CSS;
- module positions;
- the main menu and the home page;
- friendly URLs;
- a contact page;
- custom fields, to give your content exactly the properties it needs;
- a child template: your own template, built on Joomla's standard one, that keeps your changes safe when Joomla updates.
Along the way they show how easy it is, and how much you can do with just core Joomla.
This is where your experience comes in. You know these concepts from building real sites, and you know where newcomers get stuck. You bring what you know from practice; we bring the subjects, a format and the explanations to link to. We aim to leave with tutorials that are finished and useful.
Side effect: you may discover that writing documentation is fun. We will not try to stop you.
Meanwhile, at another table: the guide is going multilingual. In twenty years of translating Joomla, every language has built up its own Joomla vocabulary, often different from a standard machine translation. We have analysed the core language packs and captured those differences in rules, so that translations of the documentation speak the same language as Joomla itself. Now native speakers need to check those rules. We especially welcome languages other than English, German or Dutch, other scripts and right-to-left languages.