Organizing STuff..

[Jake]

I'm juuust getting started and I have a kind of organization challenge. Not organization like a business but organization like how to order stuff with confluence.

It seems there are a few different ways to look at the "stuff" I would contain in confluence (the content)..

There's the kind of thing it addresses (as in a website to be built vs a mobile app vs a desktop application, and so on). There's what you're gonna do with it (as in designing it, managing it, coding it, and so on). Then there's the kind of information that it is (as in troubleshooting vs how to vs policy declaration or document, and so on).

That's 3 distinct paradigms. What is a sane approach to organizing that mess? And how would I even begin to find an answer?

[Jake]

Maybe I should start by writing an article on how to write articles.  (That was a joke).

I totally figured it out. I guess I just needed to work through it and writing it out here has made the difference. I'm not sure what's appropriate for the community - to delete this whole thing and move on or leave it here. I would share my discoveries if I knew how / where.

[Sajit Nair]

Wow... this actually sounds like a Dear diary post @Jake .

Actually, Its never to late to write a "how to write article".. 
We have tons of new folks join in and they can definitely benefit from it. :)

[Jake]

To clarify. I think my concern is in how to organize the content of documents in relation to how you plan to present the information. So I'm kinda stuck not having written anything yet cause I'm not sure what to put in a single document to make it clear. One example (probably my Goliath at this point) is the need to address each step in the process of creating different types of things. So take repository management. How I plan to use the repository is something I want to formally document, but I won't work the same way in a repository for a simple website as I would with say a mobile app or a desktop application. I imagine I could cover repository management in a single document and break it down into sections for each product (eg: websites section, application section, etc), or I could cover each product in a single document and have one section on repository management in each product's document, or I could wax atomic on it and have one document per section per product and each kind of information be it's own document (eg: troubleshooting, how to, etc). With this last option I could use Confluenct to just organize how it's all presented. Not sure what the best approach is or why though.