A first draft of a quickstart guide as discussed in the last doc meeting. We'll discuss on Friday. Maybe adding mor visuals could help? Or make it more of a flowchart style? For now I just tried to capture the necessary text as short as possible.
Idea: it's fairly easy to create SVGs with clickable elements. If we need a "map" to guide people through things, that's entirely possible.
Here's a site with some simple examples: https://flourish.studio/blog/interactive-svg-template/ Just one tiny change: don't use Illustrator or Figma, but Inkscape :wink:
Mmm, Inkscape :yum:
@Dieuwertje Bloemen I love the draft (thanks for working on it!) but my mind already races to "What about THIS? What about THAT?" :sweat_smile:
In particular, do we want depositors to think about which collection they are depositing into? :thinking:
I just added a suggestion to the draft doc: "Navigate to a collection where you can create dataset"
also created a quickstart guide folder https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1QXZxeLiBeWnjn11ZaG0AuUpv4xlRMIQd
@Oliver Bertuch i've been looking to try https://graphite.rs/ as an alternative to Illustrator, though it seems Inkscape is looking a lot slicker UI-wise since last time I tried... :D
Philip Durbin π said:
Dieuwertje Bloemen I love the draft (thanks for working on it!) but my mind already races to "What about THIS? What about THAT?" :sweat_smile:
I think for the 'what about' stuff, we should just link to the relevant more detailed pages. I agree that the collection step should be added, but as an optional one at the start.
I just created a pull request: #11653
A new Quickstart Guide! Woo! :tada:
You can preview the "publish a dataset" page here: https://dataverse-guide--11653.org.readthedocs.build/en/11653/quickstart/publish.html https://dataverse-guide--11653.org.readthedocs.build/en/11653/quickstart/publish-a-dataset.html
Thanks again to @Dieuwertje Bloemen for the initial content!
On the Google Group, should we ask people to check it out and give feedback?
yeah, getting some community feedback might be nice
@Dieuwertje Bloemen do you want to do the honors? Maybe next week, when people are fresh? :smile:
yeah, sure I'll put it on my to do list for next week :wink:
It's now in the google group: https://groups.google.com/g/dataverse-community/c/TXOEFv9-0kY
Looks great! Thanks!
Also, I should mention that people can watch the video of our discussion of this quickstart guide, if they like. Or just skim the notes. Or join the next call (#docs > doc group meeting or the docs wg website) !
Or all of the above :smile_cat:
Ha, yes :smile:
On little thing about introducing a new guide BEFORE the User Guide is that we have a good amount of logic baked into Dataverse that directs users to the User Guide.
For example, the welcome notification says, "Check out the User Guide" (with a link).
Same with the navbar of Dataverse. To the left of the "Support" link there's a link to the User Guide.
We can probably address this by advertising the Quickstart Guide at the top of the index page for the User Guide, in case people don't notice from the sidebar that there's a Quickstart Guide.
Our PR came up during sprint planning yesterday:
add Quickstart Guide and first section: Publish a Dataset #11653
We have sprint planning every two weeks. We go through items on our project board (https://github.com/orgs/IQSS/projects/34) and resize them as necessary. That is, if we feel like more or less effort is required for the upcoming sprint, we change the "size" label.
For this pull request, we decided to leave it alone until the docs group has had a chance to meet again.
Alternatively, we could decide what to do with it here. Merge it? Keep iterating on it? What do YOU think? :smile:
As a reminder, you can preview the new quickstart here: https://dataverse-guide--11653.org.readthedocs.build/en/11653/quickstart/publish-a-dataset.html
I just sent out the community news and reminded the community that we'd love some feedback on the "publish a dataset" quickstart.
I would wait to merge until I've added in the link, and maybe see what other quickstart guides to add on initial 'launch' of the quickstart guides. I'll see how quickly I can whip up a 'Create a collection' quickstart guide, as it'll likely be quite similar in structure. Hopefully I'll get around to adding the links and creating the collection guide somewhere before the next meeting :face_with_monocle:
Philip Durbin π said:
On little thing about introducing a new guide BEFORE the User Guide is that we have a good amount of logic baked into Dataverse that directs users to the User Guide.
For example, the welcome notification says, "Check out the User Guide" (with a link).
Same with the navbar of Dataverse. To the left of the "Support" link there's a link to the User Guide.
We can probably address this by advertising the Quickstart Guide at the top of the index page for the User Guide, in case people don't notice from the sidebar that there's a Quickstart Guide.
I don't see a problem with them maybe not being the first item in the menu, if they're findable via big buttons in the user guide, which is the first item... (mock-up coming soon of the buttons idea)
Right, the big buttons will help a lot!
Shoot! I clicked the wrong link during the community call! Here's the right one: https://dataverse-guide--11653.org.readthedocs.build/en/11653/quickstart/publish-a-dataset.html
I added in the links to related/relevant pages in the google doc (I tried to figure out how to add it in GitHub in the pull request, but couldn't get it to work, so I did it like this. I'll also make a mock-up for the buttons we talked about adding at the top of the user guide because the user guide will remain the landing page for most users. It's in a new google doc. Not sure if those are the quickstart guides to have there. But they seemed logical to me. I'll start on a first draft of the other two this week.
First draft for a quickstart guide to publish a collection in its own google doc.
Great stuff! Thanks, @Dieuwertje Bloemen! ![]()
I just flipped #11653 to draft and updated the description to say it'll stay that way until we finish the stuff we talked about today.
meeting recording has been added to the rolling docs (8/15): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dX8ktajVsRDk-MDF-yHWV0f4vIe8U3DWrSzIerVGlF8/edit?tab=t.0
As promised, I've turned the buttons of the mockup into pngs/svgs. They're in the assets folder under the quickstart guides folder.
Looks great! Thanks! Now we just need to figure out how to make them clickable buttons!
/me looks at https://stackoverflow.com/questions/63152969/use-image-in-sphinx-as-clickable-link
@Dieuwertje Bloemen I added the SVG version in https://github.com/IQSS/dataverse/pull/11653/commits/6f2dba35fc932a68fb39214100cc8228fecd2c07
What do you think? https://dataverse-guide--11653.org.readthedocs.build/en/11653/user/index.html
Screenshot 2025-08-20 at 11.31.16β―AM.png
I would maybe add a tiny bit of whitespace at the top and bottom of it. And make the button slightly smaller (not much). It all looks a bit cramped right now, I think.
It could also be that I got the proportions of the symbol slightly off. But maybe someone else has a better eye for that kinda thing. @Vaida PlankytΔ π¨ ?
Hmm, should we edit the SVG to add more of a margin?
I just made a new one with a bit of extra space at the top and bottom (just a wild guess how much though).
oh, this is looking awesome! :smile:i can have a look to see if i can think of any improvements once the new version is up! :sunglasses:
@Omer M Fahim I can't remember, did you volunteer to add the links from the doc to the .md file?
I did the first one (the "Log In" link) here: https://github.com/IQSS/dataverse/pull/11653/commits/0458921f1ea1843d699ea420fa2fa0606e38afbc
yup, let me update that PR
Great! Please let me know if you have any questions.
I had to add a ref for the "Log In" link.
i updated the PR, please let me know if it looks ok: https://github.com/IQSS/dataverse/pull/11653/files
The build seems to be failing:
Screenshot 2025-09-19 at 11.51.57β―AM.png
If you click it and then click "raw log" you'll see this:
/home/docs/checkouts/readthedocs.org/user_builds/dataverse-guide/checkouts/11653/doc/sphinx-guides/source/quickstart/publish-a-dataset.md:21: WARNING: undefined label: 'upload-files'
/home/docs/checkouts/readthedocs.org/user_builds/dataverse-guide/checkouts/11653/doc/sphinx-guides/source/quickstart/publish-a-dataset.md:33: WARNING: undefined label: 'dataset-terms'
/home/docs/checkouts/readthedocs.org/user_builds/dataverse-guide/checkouts/11653/doc/sphinx-guides/source/quickstart/publish-a-dataset.md:40: WARNING: undefined label: 'dataset-metadata'
/home/docs/checkouts/readthedocs.org/user_builds/dataverse-guide/checkouts/11653/doc/sphinx-guides/source/quickstart/publish-a-dataset.md:48: WARNING: undefined label: 'publish-dataset'
/home/docs/checkouts/readthedocs.org/user_builds/dataverse-guide/checkouts/11653/doc/sphinx-guides/source/quickstart/publish-a-dataset.md:48: WARNING: undefined label: 'submit-for-review'
/home/docs/checkouts/readthedocs.org/user_builds/dataverse-guide/checkouts/11653/doc/sphinx-guides/source/quickstart/publish-a-dataset.md:58: WARNING: undefined label: 'dataset-versioning'
Does that make sense? You'll have to add the refs, like .. _account-log-in-options: in https://github.com/IQSS/dataverse/pull/11653/commits/0458921f1ea1843d699ea420fa2fa0606e38afbc
ah i get it
@Omer M Fahim nice editing of the quickstart guide today. Do you want to keep going? Keep adding those refs?
yeah, im having some fun with it so I'll keep going
Awesome. If you want help installing Sphinx locally, please let me know. Running it in Docker seems to take about 30 seconds per build.
Actually, if you want to install Sphinx locally, let's talk about it over at #docs > building docs locally.
@Philip Durbin π https://github.com/IQSS/dataverse/pull/11653/commits/e8c336dc42c035ee822973368d5642c692d39b4b
Updated the quickstart guide pr to sync with google doc, @Philip Durbin π could you kindly review when you get a chance. Thanks!
heres what the updated guide looks like: https://dataverse-guide--11653.org.readthedocs.build/en/11653/quickstart/publish-a-dataset.html
From a quick look, links are working! Good job. ![]()
The next step is to add the "publish a collection" page, right? Based on @Dieuwertje Bloemen's doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JtBJyWN2sOpSowyUWYU_77mQhKP1m35ZlUMB_0RXoKc/edit?usp=sharing
Do you want to take that on?
Last updated: Nov 01 2025 at 14:11 UTC