Index

Overview of Loft Docs

Index

Loft Docs is the last project documentation tool you'll ever need. Loft Docs provides one central place to manage your documentation allowing you to compose in Markdown and have the benefits of simultaneous output to the following formats:

  1. An indexed, multi-page, stand-alone, searchable (via js) website
  2. HTML
  3. Plaintext
  4. MediaWiki
  5. Advanced Help for Drupal

Gone are the days of having to update all your different documentation locations!

For installation instructions scroll down.

Features

  1. Tasklist todo item aggregation and sorting.
  2. Output to many popular formats.
  3. Compilation hooks for before and after.
  4. Custom website theming.
  5. Searchable pages (in the website output)

Contributing

If you find this project useful... please consider making a donation.

As a Reader

  1. To read documentation you probably just want to load public_html/index.html in a browser and proceed from there.
  2. Plaintext documentation may also be available in text/.
  3. MediaWiki documentation if supported will be found in mediawiki/.

As an Author

  1. You will concern yourself with the /source directory, creating your source markdown files here. This is the source of all documentation.

  2. Only files in the source directory should be edited. All other files get created during compiling.

  3. Images can be added to source/images.

  4. Use relative links when linking to other pages inside source.

  5. Use absolute links when linking to anything outside of source.

As an Admin/Content Manager

  1. You will need to read about compiling below; this is the step needed to generate derivative documentation from /source.

Linking to Other Help Pages

You should do the following to link internally to source/page2.html

<a href="page2.html">Link to Next Page</a>

As a Developer

If you are implementing any hooks and you need component or include files, which compile to markdown files in /source:

  1. Put these component files in /parts not in /source.
  2. Make sure the generated files begin with the underscore, e.g., _my_compiled_file.md. That will indicate these files are compiled and can be deleted using core/clean.

Core update

Loft Docs provides a core update feature as seen below. From the root directory type:

./core/update

Rationale

The rationalle behind this project is that it is easy to write markdown files, and it is easy to share a static html based documentation file, and it is easy to use Drupal Advanced Help module, and it is easy to version your documentation in git; but to do all this together at once… was NOT EASY.

But now with Loft Docs... it's easy.

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