Improving Cordova Documentation

For the last few weeks, we have taken measures to get in touch with and understand the experiences of a Cordova user. We put up a survey which received > 900 responses and tried to understand the pain points of working with Cordova. As it was brought up in F2F as well, majority of the users (~100 survey responses) think that the Cordova documentation isn’t up to the mark and is the biggest problem they face. We went through the responses and have summarized them.

We discussed and came up with few guidelines and possible solutions for these problem areas as mentioned. It would be great if you guys could give feedback, provide better solutions and volunteer for some of these.

  • Incorrectness

    • Outdated Stuff
    • Docs don’t reflect changes in plugin versions
    • Action Items:
      • Document Scrub: Get rid of outdated/duplicate content
      • Pin guides to specific versions
      • Add comments to docs so that people may comment if they find any inconsistency
      • Write a blog post summarizing all the survey results

  • Docs are hard to find

    • Organization on the website needs to be simplified
    • Action Items:
      • Add FAQ section to the website
      • Work on SEO of docs and website
      • Draft a proposal to re-organize content on the website

  • Plugin docs are all over the place

    • Action Items:
      • Pull core plugin docs from github along with centralized docs
      • Define a consistent structure for plugin docs
      • Show docs preview on plugin search

  • Tutorials needed

    • Basic app/plugin/platform development
    • Integration with tools like grunt, gulp, uglify
    • Release/Publish apps on different platforms
    • Debugging
    • How to work with config.xml and plugin.xml
    • Better examples of plugin API usage
    • Blog showcasing APIs

  • Quality

    • Plugin docs are usually very limited
    • Advanced usage/Core understanding docs are absent
    • Docs are difficult to apprehend for beginners
    • Action Items:
      • Write new articles for advanced usage and understanding of Cordova core: understand the working of cli commands, tasks and order of execution of build/run/prepare commands, understanding native bridges
      • Include sample apps on our website
      • Go through stackoverflow and find common problems and incorporate docs accordingly
      • General guidelines to write/review docs