datasette
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simonw
End-user documentation
Datasette's documentation is aimed at people who install and configure it.
What about end users of preconfigured and deployed Datasette instances?
Something that can be linked to from the Datasette UI would be really useful.
Idea: plugins can provide their own user-facing documentation. Datasette can like to eg datasette.io/help?plugins=datasette-vega,datasette-cluster-map to get the user manual with extra sections for those plugins.
Or... link to ?url=datasette-url and the documentation site can hit /-/plugins.json to figure out what extra manual sections to display!
Things to go in here:
- What is Datasette?
- A database contains tables full of records. A table has rows and columns.
- Understanding faceting
- How to use the filter interface
- How to export data
- How to link to data
- How to run SQL
Great argument for doing this from a conversation on Twitter about documentation-driven development:
Long ago, when the majority of commercial programs were desktop apps, I've read a very wise advice: The user manual should be written first, before even a single line if code.
https://twitter.com/b11c/status/1490466703175823362