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Get your own WalkHub, announcing a distribution for interactive tutorials

CEO, Co-Founder
Mar 15, 2013

We want to open source the backend for Walkthrough.it and turn it into an open source Drupal distribution that makes it really simple to start your own WalkHub where people can create and collaborate on interactive tutorials for software that runs in a browser. Yesterday I blogged about the YAML export we want to create for Tour module, together with the open source backend we believe this project could become a key addition to your Drupal project toolset, especially for Drupal 8. At Drupalcamp London I was happily surprised how everyone I talked with was unanimously excited about the project. What was even more inspiring was that every second person I talked with, had some new interesting idea of how they want to use the project (e.g. testing documentation to see if it's still up to date, deep linking to UI elements from documentation text, using walkthroughs as a deliverable in agile development to speed up QA and UAT, make a walkthrough game on your site, etc.). A few people told me that they want to reach out to some of their customers to suggest Walkthrough.it as a solution to some of the training and support issues they have. They told me that at least some of these organizations will want to be able to own the server where the tutorials are hosted, because they need this behind a firewall or because they want to integrate the tutorials into their documentation site. Originally we wanted to wait with open sourcing the server, so that we would have time to build out a strong service before we create our own competition. But a lot of people asked for this, and because there are so many different things people want to do with the technology I have decided that it makes sense to bring forward the schedule and to go open, all the way, from day one. We are going to build a free open source distribution that helps you set up your own WalkHub. I've updated the perks for our IndieGoGo fundraising campaign to reflect this change. I've added 3 new tiers:

  • A set of Walkthrough tutorials for your website: If you get this tier, we will develop a set of walkthrough tutorials for your Drupal website, intranet or product. Especially interesting for organizations that have lots of (new) people that need to do complex things on a Drupal site. There are only 5 of these at this price point, so be quick.
  • WalkHub early bird: Your own WalkHub before we release the distribution, you can help shape the distribution and get 2 weeks of consulting work to help you implement your own WalkHub or to add a new feature.
  • WalkHub, the same as the early bird version, but no limitation to the number of backers and 50% more expensive. If your organization needs this it pays to be quick.

We want to run the development of the distribution as an open project, with full transparency of the roadmap and development process. The community and especially our backers, will also be able to influence the features in the distribution. Even now you are able to download a copy of the WalkHub module/feature, on Drupal.org that we use in our backend and of the Walkthrough client for Drupal. Both are very much a work in progress, that is why we have only published them as Drupal sandbox projects so far. You can find the fundraising campaign for Walkthrough.it on IndieGoGo. I'm already talking with a few companies who are interested in running their own WalkHub, or who have customers who are interested. If you know someone who needs this, and you need more information before you become a backer, get in touch.

Kristof Van Tomme is an open source strategist and architect. He is the CEO and co-founder of Pronovix. He’s got a degree in bioengineering and is a regular speaker at conferences in the API, developer relations, and technical writing communities. He is the host of the Developer Success & the Business of APIs and the API Resilience podcasts.

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