View source for Help system/Help servers

==Serving Help Screens from a MediaWiki Installation==
Starting with Joomla 1.6 the official English help screens are being served from the wiki at ''http://docs.joomla.org'' making it easier and quicker for the Joomla community to collaboratively keep them accurate and up-to-date. Pages in the wiki are retrieved via URLs which include the page title so that using key references to refer directly to pages in the wiki is straightforward.

However, the issue already described above for Joomla installations, where the output from the wiki includes navigation and other output that you would generally not want to include in a help screen, is also evident with the wiki. The solution recommended for Joomla installations where a separate MediaWiki installation with a stripped-down template (''theme'' in MediaWiki parlance) is used to serve help screens, is much less than ideal because generally the idea of using a wiki in the first place is to encourage collaboration and a largely un-navigable user interface is hardly likely to achieve that.

The solution adopted for the British English help screens for Joomla 1.6 onwards is to serve the help screens via a proxy which uses the [http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Main_page MediaWiki web API] to pull data from the wiki and present it with a stripped-down template. The proxy happens to be a Joomla instance running a component developed for this purpose, but other solutions are also possible.

The information flow is as follows. The help screen is initially requested by a user logged in to an instance of the Joomla Administrator. The request is passed to the ''com_help'' component running on the proxy at ''http://help.joomla.org/proxy/''.  The component parses the request to determine the key reference and uses that to make a request for page data from the wiki at ''http://docs.joomla.org'' using the MediaWiki Web API. The wiki returns the data requested as an XML file and ''com_help'' then extracts the data it requires, performing some transformations such as replacing relative links and references to absolute ones, removing extraneous information such as tables of content and categorisations. It then constructs a web page, passing it through the default template which adds HTML headers and footers, copyright and license data, then outputs it to the user's web browser.

<noinclude>[[Category:Joomla! Help System]]</noinclude>