During the last few years, a recurring topic has been the content of wiki.typo3.org—mainly because it was less and less used and growing more outdated due to missing review procedures and a bigger focus on the official documentation. 

When this years’ budget application process started, a special interest group was formed to integrate the wiki information that was still used and to disable and remove the wiki in favour of the official documentation. The members of the TYPO3 association decided to grant us that budget and we started our work.

Content Analysis and Migration

To get an overview of the content in question we used analytics data from the full last year and generated a list of pages with five or more views. Step by step, we checked and reviewed all pages and migrated anything that should be part of the official documentation as it is still valid and could help someone. We did not migrate content related to past events, teams that are not in existence anymore, code examples that only work in TYPO3 4.5 or older and extension related content. Everything else has been added to the documentation and redirects were created to the new home of that content.

TYPO3 Core Exception Handling

The wiki was not only used as a source of general documentation but also as a target for additional information on TYPO3 Core exceptions. To allow the same functionality in line with the normal documentation editing process, a small app has been written. The app knows about all exception codes that are or have been used in the TYPO3 Core. On calling a page for an exception that does not have additional information yet, the app offers the creation of a basic template page that the user can fill in to help the next one encountering an exception.