cms_system makes including documentation with your application, or even just one of your custom modules, as simple as including some text files.
To create application-specific documentation that can easily be versioned and shipped out with your application, simply place CommonMark-formatted text files in the application/docs folder.
For any modules that you create and want to create documentation for, just place the same CommonMark-formatted docs in the module's folder, under a new folder named docs.
my_module/
css/
docs/
. . .
The files must have the file extension of .md in order to be recognized by the system.
When a help page is displayed, the Table of Contents in the sidebar will automatically find your docs and display them in the order found.
If you need more organization to your docs, you can specify a custom TOC to be used.
This allows for specifying custom names for the files, as well as splitting doc files into logical groups that you specify, but only one level deep.
To use a custom TOC, create a file called _toc.ini within your docs folder.
If this file is present, it will be used to display the links, instead of auto-generating the links from the existing files.
This file is a standard PHP .ini file.
The "options" within the file are the filename and the display name.
The filename is listed on the left of the '=' with the text used to display the link listed on the right.
my_page = My Great New Documentation Package
To group the files and provide a header, you would use the .ini's section syntax.
[Section 1] my_page = My New Documentation Package
The filename must include in it's "path" the area the documentation came from, either 'application', 'cms_system', or your module's folder name.
application/my_page = My New Documentation Package my_module/my_page = My New Module Docs
The docs system allows you to do some simple customization that allows you to integrate it into the needs of your application easily.
The system uses 2 groups 'application' and 'developer' to separate your application specific documentation from cms_system's core documentation.
All documentation config settings can be found in the module's config file at cms_system/modules/docs/config/docs.php.
To specify a theme to be used only for the documentation, set the docs.theme setting.
This allows you to completely customize the how the information looks and is displayed to match your branding, ad needs, etc.
$config['docs.theme'] = 'docs';
You can customize the group that is shown if someone simply browses to /docs.
$config['docs.default_group'] = 'developer';
You can configure whether application or developer documentation is displayed.
$config['docs.show_dev_docs'] = true;
$config['docs.show_app_docs'] = true;
You can configure docs to be displayed based on the current environment by configuring the docs.permitted_environments variable.
If the current environment is not listed in the array, any user attempting to navigate to the docs module will be redirected to the site's base URL and an error message will be displayed.
$config['docs.permitted_environments'] = array('development', 'testing', 'production');
The docs module will use the application-configured CommonMark driver to parse the docs.
This value is normally set in /application/config/application.php.
If you use the CommonMark library elsewhere in your application, it will often make sense to configure one driver for your application and another for the docs module.
This can be done by setting docs.commonmark_driver in /docs/config/docs.php to the name of the desired driver.
$config['docs.commonmark_driver'] = 'MarkdownExtra';