Joomla! Documentation™

As a documentor you have the unenviable task of creating material for a wide range of readers from beginning users to advanced professional developers. You will need to know how to use various tools (such as this wiki) and you will need to read guidelines and other meta documents. You will probably need to update those documents over time too.

General

Please be aware that the official language of the project is British/Australian English. There is a tendency for American spellings to creep into the documentation; feel free to correct these wherever you see them.

The following material is important for documentators working on all areas of the Joomla! project.

• Please read the Joomla! Editorial Style Guide.
• Words to watch

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.

Help screens

The Documentation Working Group is responsible for writing and maintaining the official help screens. For Joomla! versions up to and including 1.5.x the help screens must be hosted on a Joomla! instance. From Joomla! 1.6 onwards the help screens will be hosted on this wiki.

• Joomla! 1.5.x help screens are created on this wiki before being moved to help.joomla.org
• Setting up a local help server
• Help screens SQL dump files for Joomla! versions up to 1.5.x.