Forking the Django documentation post-1.0

[Simon Willison]

Just had a thought: once we hit 1.0, we should consider forking the  
documentation. Right now there are several places in the docs marked  
"**Only available in Django development version.**". This is OK at  
the moment, but won't be acceptable after 1.0 when we are promising  
backwards compatibility / a stable API.

We should follow Python's example and "freeze" the manual for each  
specific Django release. I'm not saying we should never update the  
1.0 manual, just that it should exist separately from the 1.1 manual  
and so on to provide people on older versions with reliable  
documentation.

Python does this really well. PHP doesn't do it at all, and I've been  
burned in the past as a result. It's pretty insane that right now PHP  
4 and PHP 5 share the same manual on the PHP site! Let's not make the  
same mistake with Django.

I'm thinking www.djangoproject.com/manual/1.0/ etc, perhaps with  
www.djangoproject.com/manual/current/ always redirecting to the most  
recent version.

While we're thinking about this, it might be worth working out how  
the URLs for official manual translations are going to work. That's  
something PHP does much better than Python. www.djangoproject.com/ 
manual/1.0/en/ look good?

Cheers,

Simon