mirror of https://github.com/zulip/zulip.git
82 lines
3.5 KiB
Markdown
82 lines
3.5 KiB
Markdown
# Documentation Overview
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Zulip has three major documentation systems:
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* Developer and sysadmin documentation: Documentation for people
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actually interacting with the Zulip codebase (either by developing
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it or installing it), and written in Markdown.
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* Core website documentation: Complete webpages for complex topics,
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written in HTML, JavaScript, and CSS (using the Django templating
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system). These roughly correspond to the documentation someone
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might look at when deciding whether to use Zulip. We don't expect
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to ever have more than about 10 pages written using this system.
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* General user documentation: Our scalable system for documenting
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Zulip's huge collection of specific features without a lot of
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overhead or duplicated code/syntax, written in Markdown. We expect
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to eventually have around 100 pages written using this system. The
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target audience for this system is individual Zulip users.
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These three systems are documented in detail.
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## Developer and sysadmin documentation
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What you are reading right now is part of the collection of
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documentation targeted at developers and people running their own
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Zulip servers. These docs are written in
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[Commonmark Markdown](http://commonmark.org/) with a small bit of rST.
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We've chosen Markdown because it is
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[easy to write](http://commonmark.org/help). The source for Zulip's
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developer documentation is at `docs/` in the Zulip git repository, and
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they are served in production at
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[zulip.readthedocs.io](https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/).
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If you want to build the developer documentation locally (e.g. to test
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your changes), the dependencies are automatically installed as part of
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Zulip development environment provisioning, and you can build the
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documentation using:
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```
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./tools/build-docs
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```
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and then opening `http://127.0.0.1:9991/docs/index.html` in your
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browser. The raw files are available at
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`file:///path/to/zulip/docs/_build/html/index.html` in your browser
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(so you can also use e.g. `firefox docs/_build/html/index.html` from
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the root of your Zulip checkout).
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If you are adding a new page to the table of contents, you will want
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to modify `docs/index.rst` and run `make clean` before `make html`, so
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that other docs besides your new one also get the new entry in the
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table of contents.
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You can also usually test your changes by pushing a branch to GitHub
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and looking at the content on the GitHub web UI, since GitHub renders
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Markdown, though that won't be as faithful as the `make html`
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approach.
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When editing dependencies for the Zulip documentation, you should edit
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`requirements/docs.in` and then run `tools/update-locked-requirements`
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which updates docs.txt file (which is used by ReadTheDocs to build the
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Zulip developer documentation, without installing all of Zulip's
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dependencies).
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## Core website documentation
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Zulip has around 10 HTML documentation pages under `templates/zerver`
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for specific major topics, like the features list, client apps,
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integrations, hotkeys, API bindings, etc. These documents often have
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somewhat complex HTML and JavaScript, without a great deal of common
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pattern between them other than inheriting from the `portico.html`
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template. We generally avoid adding new pages to this collection
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unless there's a good reason, but we don't intend to migrate them,
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either, since this system gives us the flexibility to express these
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important elements of the product clearly.
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## General user documentation
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To learn more about Zulip's general user documentation, visit our guide
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on writing user documentation [here](user-docs.html).
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