Joomla! Documentation™

The Documentation Working Group

The Documentation Working Group is part of the Production Department. It is responsible for creating and maintaining all the official Joomla! documentation including that for end-users, administrators and third-party developers as well as the Help Screens served in the backend of Joomla! websites.

Team on volunteers Portal.

Documentation SubTeams

Documentation Helpscreen Team

The Documentation Helpscreen Team is in charge of maintaining and updating the help screens for the Joomla! releases.

Documentation Translation Team

The official documentation language is British English. Translations of the official documentation into other languages are the responsibility of the Documentation Translation Team (JDT).

en-GB User Interface Text Working Group

The Joomla! en-GB User Interface Text Team is in charge of establishing and maintaining the official style guidelines for writing en-GB strings, as well as ensuring consistency throughout Joomla.

Joomla! Documentation Wiki

The bulk of the documentation effort now revolves around this Wiki.

• Please refer to the Docs Wiki Roadmap for a complete overview of tasks.
• If you are new to MediaWiki you should consult the MediaWiki Handbook for information on using the Wiki software.
• There are some conventions for making sure the Wiki remains organized.
  • Use the Image naming guidelines.
  • Observe the convention for labeling pages with Joomla! version numbers.
• You might want to take a look at
  • the requested but yet empty pages
  • the Cookie jar: a list of pages that have been categorised as being small, well-defined tasks that require minimal commitment to complete
  • Articles that require a review (also awaiting a copy editor)
  • Articles for which information is required: you may be the one that knows certain details
  • Landing pages: pages that match important keywords used by people using search engines to find documentation.
• Pages that define terms can be added to the Glossary, but not by adding [[Category:Glossary]] to the page. Please see Talk:Glossary for more information.

Internal References

• List of local wiki templates that can be used in your wiki pages. Templates reduce repetition and are the basis of modular documentation.
• List of local wiki extensions that have been installed on this Wiki. Extensions provide additionally functionality to the Wiki such as syntax highlighting and link search.
• List of local interwiki links that are available on this Wiki. These provide useful shortcuts to creating URLs to other websites including the Joomla forum, help screens and issue tracker, as well as links to the PHP documentation and Wikipedia.

All Documentation Websites

The Documentation Working Group currently maintains the following websites:

api.joomla.org

This entire site is automatically generated by the phpDocumentor package from an analysis of the Joomla! source code and making use of specially formatted comments embedded in the source code itself. It is an invaluable tool for all Joomla! developers.

docs.joomla.org

The concept behind docs.joomla.org is that it will become the central resource for developing single-source modular documentation within the Joomla! project. The idea is that we write stuff once then re-use it in a somewhat analogous way to modern OOP software development. By building a central database of document "chunks" we gain maximum benefit from the efforts of a limited number of authors and we produce "agile" documents where a single change is rapidly propagated to all the derived documents affected.

Those interested in the techniques will find more information here.

Those of you, who are not very experienced in image editing and might want to improve the quality of their screenshots should read the tutorial Taking Screenshots – How To Enhance.

Joomla! help screens are created on this wiki and are shown in the backend of any Joomla! website from here.

Other Public Resources

• Public discussion forum
• Documentation Working Group mailing list
• Developer documentation mailing list
• The Documentation Working Group on the Joomla! Volunteers Portal™
• The Documentation Translation Team on the Joomla! Volunteers Portal™
• Documentation Translators
• MediaWiki setup notes
• Documentors profile in this wiki.