docs

docs

The Form Tools documentation.

#docs#documentation#jekyll
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Form Tools Documentation

This repo contains the Form Tools documentation for the upcoming Form Tools site, to be found at docs.formtools.org. It includes all documentation: the main userdoc, installation, upgrading instructions, module documentation and API.

We use Jekyll to handle generating the actual markup. Jekyll is a static website generator. In other words, rather than the web pages being constructed on the fly as people request them from the server, all the heavy lifting is done beforehand. The site is generated before being pushed to the server.

The new website + docs have lots of benefits:

  • Speed! - static files are far faster to load than the PHP/MySQL-heavy website right now.
  • Open! - now that the doc is in a public repo, it's super easy for people to contribute and fix documentation, unlike the old site where the doc is in a closed database.
  • more secure - the old Form Tools site has a whole bunch of different pieces of software running on it, and it's been hacked more than once.

Contributing

Fixes to the documentation and contributions are always welcome! You can contribute in two ways:

  1. Browse the documentation online and click the "EDIT PAGE" button when you find an error, or something you'd like to improve on. That will take you to github.com where you can edit the page right through your web browser.

  2. Clone the repository and build it locally. There, make your changes and submit a pull request. You might want to do this if you want to contribute a new tutorial, for example.

I manually review all contributions.

How to build locally

If you want to run the documentation locally, you'll need to do the following:

  1. Clone this repo.

  2. Install Jekyll via the instructions here

  3. Once it's been installed, open up your terminal/command line, navigate to the root folder of this repo and enter:

    yarn install 
yarn global add grunt-cli

  4. Next, start up the doc with grunt start (I need to run sudo grunt start myself).

That starts a local server which you can access at http://localhost:4000/docs/. At this point, you can edit the files locally and the HTML files will be automatically regenerated on the fly.

Page metadata

I'm current working on adding documentation search feature. In order for this to be as useful as possible, the pages can have these optional front-matter tags to provide additional metadata for the search.

versions: FT2
page_type: overview
categories: modules
tags: permissions,visualization

tags

Arbitrary strings to pinpoint what the page is about. This is as fine-grained as it gets and it's the only one of these metadata properties that actually visually appears in each documentation page. The user can click on the pills containing these names and it lets them perform searches to filter the results to pages sharing the same tags.

This list should be kept up to date. Current tags: permissions, views, fields, field_types, option_lists, validation, submissions, data_export, emails, filters, themes, modules, spam, email, security, deprecated, files, menus

versions

FT2 or FT3. Comma-delimited. If empty, it's assumed the page is relevant for any version of Form Tools. This value is used in searching only.

page_type

  • toc - table of contents (a list of links for the section)
  • introduction - an introduction/overview to a component / subject. A good starting point for something.

categories

Comma-delimited list of: core, userdoc, modules, themes, api, theme_development, module_development, tutorial, installation, upgrading, translations, basics, accounts, developer

These are presented in the search form to let you limit the results to a particular category.

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