Attention

TYPO3 v6 has reached its end-of-life April 18th, 2017 and is not maintained by the community anymore. Looking for a stable version? Use the version switch on the top left.

There is no further ELTS support. It is strongly recommended updating your project.

Adding documentation

If you plan to upload your extension to the TYPO3 Extension Repository (TER), you should first consider adding a documentation to your extension. A documentation will help users and administrators to quickly install and configure your extension and give it more weight.

The documentation platform https://docs.typo3.org centralizes documentation for every project. It supports three different kind of documentation:

  1. (recommended) A Sphinx project, stored within EXT:extkey/Documentation/

  2. A simple README file stored as EXT:extkey/README.rst as seen on Github

  3. (legacy) An OpenOffice manual, stored as EXT:extkey/doc/manual.sxw

Sphinx project

Sphinx is the official format for official TYPO3 documentation. A Sphinx-based documentation is a set of plain text files making up the chapters or sections of the documentation. It uses a markup language called "reStructuredText" (reST).

Advantages of this new documentation format are numerous:

  • Output formats: Sphinx projects may be automatically rendered as HTML or TYPO3-branded PDF.

  • Cross-references: It is easy to cross-reference other chapters and sections of other manuals (either TYPO3 references or extension manuals).

  • Multilingual: Unlike OpenOffice, Sphinx projects may be easily localized and automatically presented in the most appropriate language to TYPO3 users.

  • Collaboration: As the documentation is plain text, it is easy to work as a team on the same manual or quickly review changes using any versioning system.

Although it is possible to write every single line of a Sphinx-based documentation from scratch, the TYPO3 community provides tools that help write and manage Sphinx projects:

  • The extension "Sphinx" (Sphinx Python Documentation Generator and Viewer) installs a local Sphinx environment to view, edit and compile documentation in the backend of your TYPO3 website. It can be installed from the TYPO3 Extension Repository (TER) like any other extension.

  • The Sphinx extension is able to convert existing OpenOffice manuals (manual.sxw) into Sphinx projects with just one click.

  • An example manual is available on the TYPO3 Documentation Github repository.

  • The Extension Builder provides a skeleton documentation based on the above-mentioned Git repository.

  • A good primer to get started using the reStructuredText markup.

README.rst

A "README.rst" is a simple text file stored at the root of your extension directory and briefly describing the purpose of your extension. It is best suited when installing or using your extension is straightforward. The format of this file is reStructuredText, as for chapters of a Sphinx project.

Tip

In TYPO3 6.2, the system extension "documentation" is using such a simple manual.

OpenOffice manual

The OpenOffice SXW format used to be the official documentation format for TYPO3. Use of this format is highly discouraged since support on docs.typo3.org is about to be dropped. Please use the tools mentioned above to convert your existing SXW file into a Sphinx project instead.