Hello all,
As many of you know, Jamie van Dyke and I have been working on the
Caboose Rails Documentation Project for a few months now, adding
documentation patches to the API docs. By way of a progress update,
we have first iteration patches in for ActionView, a few pieces of
ActionController, and a good chunk of ActiveRecord. A number of these
have some problems that we're working out and such, but over all we're
making progress! 
As we've worked on this project and discussed it with the Core team, we've noticed that maybe a more open, community editing process would be beneficial. This would help give us immediate feedback from the people who will be using the docs: the community. While at the same time, we've discussed it with a number of community members (in general and at a Birds of a Feather session at RailsConf), and we've noticed that many of you feel like (a) you're seeing no results and (b) you should be. And that's very true. So in the interest of providing you with results (you ARE paying for this, so you should be seeing some results!) and offering more of what users need, we're growing the project a bit and opening http://www.railsdocumentation.org/.
The site is primarily split into four parts. The first part is the API documentation; there you'll find our "version" of the docs, with all of our patches applied. You can browse through them, enjoy them, and download a "mega patch" that will apply all of our doc patches to your Rails codebase. You'll also find an issue tracker (generously provided by the guys at Lighthouse) for filing tickets on any issues you see in the current patches and any places that you think need more API documentation.
Secondly, you'll see that we've posted the start to a narrative book.
Jamie started his own open source Rails book, Getting Started with
Rails, that he hasn't been able to devote much time to lately. As
such, he decided to turn it over to the community, where we can all
work on it. You're able to download a PDF version and the LaTeX
source. Read the PDF and submit patches on the LaTeX back to us!
You'll see that we have a section for minidocs. These will be targeted guides, something similar in spirit to manuals.rubyonrails.org. We don't actually have any right now, so if you've written one, please let us know by e-mailing us at the address on that page!
Lastly, you'll see we've spun up some community channels. There is an IRC channel on Freenode called #rails-doc, where Jamie and I (and others hopefully) will hang out to answer questions, discuss documentation, talk about patches and so on. There's also a mailing list for discussion and such.
This is going to be a community effort, so I invite (and implore! ;)) you to come and get involved in what we're doing.
Thanks, Jeremy
