Plutus Community Docs: a new documentation site for devs, by devs

Author:

Ignacio Calderon de la Barca - Technical Community Manager

Article

Input Output Global (IOG) seeks to empower open source and community-driven development. Communities enriching the space are the cornerstone for technological adoption and success.

Similarly, the value of community-driven resources - documentation, tools, etc. - cannot be understated. No single team can match thousands of brains from the community. The best and more relevant documentation and content tend to emerge from people creating value for the ecosystem.

The Cardano blockchain enjoys a growing list of community content resources, managed and curated by a variety of players. The Cardano Community Discord channel serves as a focal point for the developer community. Cardano Stack Exchange goes a step further, driven by community members with some IOG team members contributing. Essential Cardano (currently in public beta), provides a curated platform for community content, powered by an open GitHub repo. The Cardano Foundation's developer portal provides another valuable jump off point to reach multiple resources.

Plutus Community Docs (PCD) is the latest addition to this growing list of community-centric platforms created by the community and for the community, meeting the rising demand for detailed technical content.

PCD will become a central source that promotes & gathers the most valuable developer documentation ranging from setting up an environment to DApp development, best practices & open-source community tools.

Continuously collating Cardano’s technical content

There now exists a wealth of Plutus-related documentation.

There are Plutus-related YouTube channels, for example, and hundreds of GitHub repos created and maintained by the community.

Cardano's design ethos and the community's passion enable a strong focus on building secure solutions with real-world utility.

New programming languages require support through documentation, tutorials, user guides, and a community of experts and mentors driving learning across the community. This is a growing trend since the first cohort of Plutus Pioneers. Students have stepped-up and carried the pioneering flag with avid members sharing their solutions in the form of guides and one-to-one conversations on Discord.

As a result, the community now has a growing list of useful notes and guides to learn from. IOG helped the community organize and gather all of these resources into a central place. At a high-level, in the site you can find:

• Environment set-up - includes instructions to get your environment ready, covering different alternatives for different operating systems using Nix.

• Plutus Pioneer documentation - A detailed guide to follow along the lectures of the latest Plutus Pioneer iteration plus solutions to the homeworks.

• Marlowe Pioneer documentation - soon to come

Benefits of Plutus Community Docs

Other notable benefits of PCD over official documentation include:

• Fast to Update: The site can be updated quickly and regularly, enabling fast feedback and turnaround of updates..

• Varied Content: PCD is accessible to all projects building tools on Cardano and it contains the latest content in terms of best practices for development.

• Become a docs collaborator and earn reputation: Regular and significant contributions might get you invited to become a collaborator. This gives you reputation within the community, a special Discord tag (Community Docs Contributor), and the ability to drive open source development.

Contribution Mechanics

The most important aspect for the success of decentralized collaboration are the mechanics established for contributing. This is summarized below and mentions the most important ideas. For a more detailed description of how to contribute refer to our guide.

Please identify if there is something missing in the Plutus Community Docs website that you would like to add or update.

Please carefully read the site and documentation available as reviewing PRs takes considerable time and effort from collaborators and site maintainers.

PCD grows with every contribution

All developers can expect a ton more content on PCD about Plutus and Marlowe, including new tools and new industry-standard guides to break through into development. But this is only possible through community collaboration, thus you are invited to contribute. IOG will help organize challenges to populate the site for the greatest benefit of the Cardano community.

I would like to give a big shoutout to all documentation creators from:

• First & second Plutus Pioneer cohorts: NStankov#3321, Rik G#8569, zarej#3886, and matthias BNR#0450

• IOG: dino#0980, Igodlab#3499 and Larry Adames

• Community Docs Contributors: Strange3s#2671, Whatever [SIDAN]#3725, Deceptikon#9964, ingelran#8323, jhampac#0690, blackFlyingShark#4644, carleryd#0762, R2#3029, selipso#3964, pgwada#0227, stake_pool#2988, WoofPool#8486, and a special thanks for putting an extra effort to Totes#5706 and jmhoms#7394.