Target

This feature request is not posted for a particular documentation page, but has a general purpose.

It mainly concerns pages which are strictly speaking documentation ones (like https://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/core...) as well as any kind of tutorials and other more general information.

Concern

With the currently quite frequent changes in the Drupal 8 specifications, I noticed that a lot of pages are out of date either partially or totally, and it becomes more and more difficult to immediately know what is reliable or not.

Proposed change

So a simple (and hopefully easy to apply) change to the page template would be a great help: make the pages automatically display their last revision date.

Issue fork api-2616858

Command icon Show commands

Start within a Git clone of the project using the version control instructions.

Or, if you do not have SSH keys set up on git.drupalcode.org:

Support from Acquia helps fund testing for Drupal Acquia logo

Comments

cFreed created an issue. See original summary.

malcomio’s picture

Project: Drupal core » Drupal.org site moderators
Version: 8.0.x-dev »
Component: documentation » Textual improvements
Priority: Major » Normal

Sounds like a good idea, but I think it shouldn't be in the drupal core issue queue.

cFreed’s picture

it shouldn't be in the drupal core issue queue

I don't have any definitive opinion about that: I simply and spontaneously used the channel which was proposed in one of the documentation pages.

If you think of a better place please let me know.
Thanks in advance.


EDIT: I just noticed you'd already partially answer my question, changing from "Drupal core" and "documentation" to "Drupal.org webmasters" and "textual improvements".
It puzzles me because, as I already said, it is the proposed channel at the bottom of any documentation page, like this:

Buggy or inaccurate documentation? Please file an issue

gisle’s picture

Project: Drupal.org site moderators » Drupal.org customizations
Version: » 7.x-3.x-dev
Component: Textual improvements » Code

Nothing webmasters can do about this. We don't have access to node templates. Moving to Drupal.org customizations.

drumm’s picture

Project: Drupal.org customizations » API
Version: 7.x-3.x-dev » 7.x-2.x-dev

API.Drupal.org uses API module to parse Drupal code comments and show the documentation pages.

The quick way to do this would be to store when something was updated during parsing. I expect we aren’t doing that currently.

The correct impractical way would be to use Git blame to figure out when the documentation comment was changed with Git blame. We do parse from Git clones, but they may be shallow clones, and switching to parsing tarballs could happen in the future.

Another way to get at this goal might be some way of highlighting changes between branches. To show if something changed between 8.7.x and 8.6.x, for example. We do have the data for that already parsed.

jhodgdon’s picture

I do not think the API module could achieve the desired objective.

Times available to the API module:
1. Time that the file was last parsed.
2. Timestamp on the file in the file system.

Neither of these is relevant to figuring out when the doc block was last updated in Git. For instance, if you're looking at Drupal 8.8, some file in there that hasn't been updated since Drupal 8.0 would show as recently updated, whereas actually the documentation is quite old. You would need to use Git to figure out when a chunk of code was actually last updated, and that is beyond the capabilities of the API module (and I don't think we would want to add it).

I guess we could compare to the previous version and put a note on a page saying "Changed since 8.6" or "Unchanged since 8.6" or something. I don't think we would really want to compare to all previous versions though...

spheresh made their first commit to this issue’s fork.