Maintaining useful and accurate documentation helps to ensure the health and sustainability of the project. This page describes how the VuFind® project maintains its documentation.

The most recent website and wiki review process was completed in December, 2023.

Each year, generally coinciding with a major release of the software, members of the Project Management Committee review website and wiki content for currency and accuracy based on the following criteria:

Based on web analytics gathered using Matomo, data from the prior calendar year is used to identify (at minimum) the 50 most popular pages on vufind.org. These pages are distributed to PMC members with appropriate expertise for review, and are checked for accuracy.

See the Popular Pages list for more details.

Based on file age data gathered from Dokuwiki, pages which have not been edited in at least three years (excluding historical pages such as meeting minutes) are distributed to PMC members with appropriate expertise for review, and are checked for accuracy.

On the server, running the following command in the data/pages subdirectory of Dokuwiki will return a list of pages that should be reviewed:

find -type f -mtime +1095 -size +150c | grep -v "./vufind2" | grep -v "./changelog/" | grep -v "./legacy" | grep -v "minutes" | grep -v "transcript" | grep -v "newsletter"

This finds files over three years old and greater than 150 bytes (since many old files are small redirects to other pages); it also filters out various filename patterns that indicate historical content.

• If the page references integration with an external product, is the latest version accurately reflected?
• Does the page contain release-specific notes that need to be cleaned up? (See below for guidelines).

Some documentation includes specific notes for different releases of VuFind®. Any version-specific notes referencing releases more than five years old are removed. When saving the removal of these notes, an appropriate description (e.g. “Removing notes specific to version 3.0”) should be used in the Edit summary to facilitate ongoing access via the “Old revisions” list, and a note should be added to the top of the page indicating “See Old revisions button below for access to notes specific to earlier releases.”

It is appropriate to retain information about earlier versions in some circumstances; e.g., notes about when particular features were first introduced. This guideline is intended to prevent pages from becoming overly complex due to multiple conditional blocks and statements.

The Learning VuFind® book should also be periodically checked for accuracy; however, there is not yet a formal process in place for this.

There is not yet a process for reviewing (and potentially re-recording) video tutorials. This is another topic for future consideration.