Basic Principles of TYPO3 Documentation¶

Introduction to TYPO3 Documentation¶

For an excellent introduction, please see the 3 part series on Marcus Schwemer's blog TYPO3 Worx:

• GUIDE TO TYPO3 DOCUMENTATION – PART 1: THE USER-INTERFACE
• GUIDE TO TYPO3 DOCUMENTATION – PART 2: CONTENT STRUCTURE
• GUIDE TO TYPO3 DOCUMENTATION – PART 3: CONTRIBUTION AND REST HELPERS!

What's TYPO3 Documentation?¶

TYPO3 documentation may be one of the following:

• It can be one of the official manuals like TYPO3 Explained.
• It can be the documentation of a system extension.
• It can be the documentation of a 3rdparty extension.
• TYPO3 documentation can also be a Changelog entry for the core, for example a documented breaking change or new feature.

Common Characteristics of TYPO3 documentation¶

All of these examples have a few things in common:

• The documentation is rendered and found on https://docs.typo3.org
• The documentation has a common theme, all pages look similar and use the same styles
• Most of the documentation can be directly edited by the community. For third party extensions, this depends on where and how the source-code is hosted and maintained.
• The source of the documentation is written (mostly) in reStructuredText (reST)
• All documentation is rendered using the same rendering toolchain. All documenation can be rendered locally, with the officially supported docker image.
• The documentation source files adhere to General Conventions and Coding Guidelines and share a common structure (e.g. all documentation files in a Documentation subdirectory).
• Due to the conventions, the rendering of documentation can be automated and every documentation project only requires a minimum of setup.

So, What's Rendering?¶

Rendering means (in this specific case) converting the reST format (.rst files) into its final, readable form, which you can than view in your browser (like this page, which you are probably reading online. If not, load https://docs.typo3.org/typo3cms/HowToDocument/BasicPrinciples.html in your browser).

In comparison, this is what the original source file looks like: https://docs.typo3.org/typo3cms/HowToDocument/_sources/BasicPrinciples.txt

Technically, this means converting the reST (.rst files) into HTML, automatically creating the menu, using the current theme to add additional styles and images, etc.

Different Kinds of TYPO3 Documentation¶

The things that are different for various kinds of documentation are:

• Where the issues are maintained (e.g. on Forge or Github)
• Where the source code (git repository) is kept
• The workflow for making changes to the documentation

To get to the issues or repository of the documentation: On the page of the rendered manual, click on "Related Links" and then click on "Issues" or "Repository".