Joomla! Documentation™

Introduction

JDOC Manual is an extension designed to present JDOC pages organised in manual form. The code is available from Github. Just download and install as for any other component:

https://github.com/ceford/j4xdemos-com-jdocmanual/archive/refs/heads/master.zip

Screenshot

In Use

This component can display up to three different manuals located on Mediawiki servers provided an index document has been created for each. For example, you may wish to switch from Joomla 4 documents to Joomla 3 documents and to see documents for a custom component delivered by a custom Mediawiki server. The sources are set up in the component Options. The default installation has indexes for Joomla 4, Joomla 4 Help Screens, and Joomla 3. The indexes need to be updated regularly.

After installation you first need to fetch the index document by selecting the Fetch Index button in the toolbar. Each time you do this the index is fetched and stored as html in a new entry in the database. This is what appears in the component index panel at the left of the content area.

With the index panel populated you can select an item from the list. On first selection the page is fetched from the document server, processed to make it suitable for display in the JDOC Manual component, and saved in the database. On a later request for that page it is fetched from the database.

If you have reason to believe that the page may be out of date you can select the Update Page button to re-fetch the page from source.

If you want to see the page in a different language you need to set up the language list in the component Options and then select the language from the Language button in the toolbar. If the document is not available in the selected language you will see the English version with a message to that effect at the top. You can select the Index language and Document languages separately but it will be a while before many indexes are translated.

The version of the page displayed in the Manual differs from the original as follows:

• Everything above the main content is removed.
• The footer and everything below is removed.
• All links are removed because they do not work as expected in this context.

If you find a problem with the content of a page you could join the documentation team and fix it yourself!