doc.silverstripe.org

This repository contains the source code powering the Silverstripe CMS developer documentation website and userhelp website.

This application is build on Gatsby, a static site generator based on React. It sources content from the framework repository for each major release.

This repository does NOT contain the most current documentation.

The documentation files are written in the markdown format and the most current versions of these files and are not stored here. Instead, they are stored in a docs folder alongside the framework source code in each framework repository. For example, the documentation markdown files for the master branch of the SilverStripe framework are stored in https://github.com/silverstripe/silverstripe-framework/tree/master/docs.

Installation

To set up a local instance of doc.silverstripe.org:

• Clone this repository to an empty directory

   git clone https://github.com/silverstripe/doc.silverstripe.org path/to/ssdocs

Docker install

No local NodeJS nor gatsby-cli is required for this option.

• Make sure docker and docker-compose are installed and docker daemon is running
• Simply use ./docker/run to run gatsby commands
  • ./docker/run build would be equal to run gatsby build within a container
  • ./docker/run develop -p 8000 would run gatsby develop -p 8000 within a container.

Native install

• Install Gatsby CLI

Building

To test a static build of the site, first create a production environment file.

cp .env.development .env.production

Then, run the build.

gatsby build
gatsby serve

These commands will give you an exact representation of how the site will run on a production server, with statically generated html files and server-side rendering.

Toggling between docs and userhelp

Whether the application uses the docs.silverstripe.org content or userhelp.silverstripe.org is determined by the environment variable, DOCS_CONTEXT. You can set this in the .env.development file, or use one of the script shortcuts:

yarn dev-docs
yarn dev-user
yarn build-docs
yarn build-user

Developing

From within path/to/ssdocs, run the command

gatsby develop

to instantiate a development server. This will consume all of the markdown files in both major release branches and allow you to browse the documentation site on http://localhost:8000 by default (see the Gatsby docs for instructions on customising the port).

Authoring

You can make changes directly to the source markdown files and get live updates in the development server without having to rebuild the app or even refresh the browser. The clones of the silverstripe/framework repositories are in the .cache/gatsby-source-git folder in the root of this project. There are subfolders for 3/ and 4/, respective to their branch names. You can edit the files in docs/en from there.

Just don't forget to merge your changes upstream once you're done. Building the gatsby app will not preserve your content changes, since the remote repositories are the source of truth.

Deploying content changes

Once your contribution has been merged into the master branch, it will be deployed to production via a Github action in the repository that holds the markdown files (e.g. silverstripe/silverstripe-framework for docs).

Deploying app changes

Once your change is merged in to the master branch of this repository, it will be deployed to production.

Contribution

To contribute an improvement to the https://docs.silverstripe.org or https://userhelp.silverstripe.org functionality or theme, submit a pull request on the GitHub project. Any approved pull requests will make their way onto the https://docs.silverstripe.org or https://userhelp.silverstripe.org sites in the next release.

If you wish to edit the documentation content, submit a pull request on the framework Github project or the userhelp documentation repository or corresponding module.