As mentioned previously, we have been working on streamlining and improving the MDC’s category system and main topic page formatting. Nickolay Ponomarev stepped up and did the bulk of the category work, managing to finish in two days what I thought was going to take well over a week. His contributions to this project (and to the MDC in general) are invaluable.

In addition to the category and topic page work, we have reworked the MDC’s “How to Help” pages, adding a writer’s guide and generally cleaning up the overall structure and organization.

The result of this work is:

• a streamlined set of categories
• a more sensible topic page structure that includes links to discussion forums
• a clearer set of MDC project pages that will (hopefully) make it easier for interested contributors to get involved

Our hope, of course, is that these changes will improve the overall usability and usefulness of the MDC. If you have any comments or suggestions for further improvements, please leave a note here, on our mailing list, or email me privately.

Just a quick note to point out that it’s the Mozilla Developer Center’s first birthday. The English wiki went up one year ago today.

Since then, according to the possibly-wildly-inaccurate stats generated by the wiki software, the English wiki has had over 6300 user accounts created, over 1750 pages of documentation added, over 25,000 edits made, and has served almost 11,000,000 pages.

None of this would have been possible, of course, without the incredible work and dedication of all the MDC volunteers, including writers, editors, admins, localizers, designers, and reviewers. Thank you to everyone who has ever contributed to the project.

Just a quick note/warning — we’re going to be making some relatively extensive, albeit individually minor, changes to the pages in the MDC wikis.

First, we’re going to be changing the category system to streamline document organization and to make it easier to find stuff. Second, we’re going to be revamping the various main “topic” pages, again to streamline organization and improve usability. If you’re interested in the details, they’ve been discussed here: summary, full final thread (there were a few earlier threads if you’re interested enough to dig through the archives).

For the most part this will have no impact on users or authors except the categorization system will be a little erratic for the week or two it takes to get the work finished. If you have any questions about this or anything else related to the MDC, please feel free to contact me at deb@mozilla.com, or via the dev-mdc mailing list / mozilla.dev.mdc newsgroup. Thanks.

Update: If you’re interested in helping with the category changes, please come to the #devmo channel on irc.mozilla.org, particularly if you have any questions.

Two “type”-style subcategories we won’t be changing are the Tools and Community subcategories. Those will be left as they are.