Currently targeting these changes for 1.2.4.

Specific Issues

Issue/improvement	Notes	Status
Retarget developer manual to contributing to GeoMesa itself	Follows example of other OS projects Current stuff in developer manual should be moved into user manual, probably cleaned up/consolidated	In PR
Should user guide assume users are writing Java/Scala code? (Create separate system administrator guide?)
Clarify which parts of data management chapter are Accumulo-specific
Accumulo data store chapter	Can use text from developer manual	In PR
Kafka data store chapter	Can use text from developer manual	In PR
HBase/Google BigTable data store chapter		In PR
Cassandra data store chapter		In PR
Spark/Storm	Each has tutorials
Blob store	Described a little bit in command-line tools	In PR
Native API		In PR
Stream data store		In PR
Stats	The stats command line tools are in that section
ETL and converter library	README.md has more information than Sphinx docs	In PR
Aggregation operations (e.g. heat maps), WPS	Mentioned in tutorials.

Things that need to be documented

how to pass hints through geoserver viewparams parameter
hints to select query strategy
hints/system props to select cost strategy for selecting index
hints/system props to select exact count behavior
hints/system props to enable query timeouts
system prop for number of ranges that will be split into multiple queries
system prop for feature ID generation
batch writer config - org.locationtech.geomesa.accumulo.GeomesaSystemProperties.BatchWriterProperties
spark-sql, spark-sql rest API
BIN formats? enabling gzip for BIN format
Index improvements per specific versions, how updating versions will only use index improvements for new schemas e.g. why should users migrate data
reserved keywords: GEOMESA-1229
loose bbox config and implications
query sampling
sft keywords for geoserver layers

Proposed docs architecture (chapters and sections)

Introduction
Architecture Overview
Installation and Configuration (comment: isn't this going to be mainly data store dependent-- mostly yes; created a section for each data store to avoid breaking the installation page too much)
Accumulo Data Store
Kafka Data Store
HBase/BigTable Data Stores
Cassandra Data Store
Modules
- Blobstore
- Native API
- Stats API
GeoServer
Command-line Tools
Data Management
Examples

Sphinx docs vs. READMEs

In many cases there is confusion as to where the definitive documentation for a particular module should be; in the case of the converter library, for example, the README.md is more detailed than the relevant section in the Sphinx manual.

Possible solutions:

Mirror READMEs to sections in the Sphinx docs (current solution)
- is error prone due to Markdown → RST conversion
- In effect have to maintain the same or similar text in two different places
Replace READMEs with stubs that point to the relevant Sphinx docs?
- GitHub does render RST docs as text (e.g. https://github.com/locationtech/geomesa/blob/master/docs/user/installation_and_configuration.rst)
- but some formatting issues (i.e. substitutions will not be replaced, etc.)
???

/opt/devel/src/geomesa/geomesa-accumulo/geomesa-accumulo-datastore/src/main/scala/org/locationtech/geomesa/accumulo/accumulo.scala