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... and how to contribute.
Django’s documentation uses the Sphinx documentation system, which in turn is based on docutils. The basic idea is that lightly-formatted plain-text documentation is transformed into HTML, PDF, and any other output format.
To actually build the documentation locally, you’ll currently need to install Sphinx – easy_install Sphinx should do the trick.
Then, building the html is easy; just make html from the docs directory.
To get started contributing, you’ll want to read the ReStructuredText Primer. After that, you’ll want to read about the Sphinx-specific markup that’s used to manage metadata, indexing, and cross-references.
The main thing to keep in mind as you write and edit docs is that the more semantic markup you can add the better. So:
Add ``django.contrib.auth`` to your ``INSTALLED_APPS``...
Isn't nearly as helpful as:
Add :mod:`django.contrib.auth` to your :setting:`INSTALLED_APPS`...
This is because Sphinx will generate proper links for the later, which greatly helps readers. There's basically no limit to the amount of useful markup you can add.
Besides the Sphinx built-in markup, Django's docs defines some extra description units:
Settings:
.. setting:: INSTALLED_APPS
To link to a setting, use :setting:`INSTALLED_APPS`.
Template tags:
.. templatetag:: regroup
To link, use :ttag:`regroup`.
Template filters:
.. templatefilter:: linebreaksbr
To link, use :tfilter:`linebreaksbr`.
Field lookups (i.e. Foo.objects.filter(bar__exact=whatever)):
.. fieldlookup:: exact
To link, use :lookup:`exact`.
django-admin commands:
.. django-admin:: syncdb
To link, use :djadmin:`syncdb`.
django-admin command-line options:
.. django-admin-option:: --traceback
To link, use :djadminopt:`--traceback`.
For a quick example of how it all fits together, check this out:
First, the ref/settings.txt document starts out like this:
.. _ref-settings: Available settings ================== ...
Next, if you look at the topics/settings.txt document, you can see how a link to ref/settings works:
Available settings ================== For a full list of available settings, see the :ref:`settings reference <ref-settings>`.
Next, notice how the settings (right now just the top few) are annotated:
.. setting:: ADMIN_FOR ADMIN_FOR --------- Default: ``()`` (Empty tuple) Used for admin-site settings modules, this should be a tuple of settings modules (in the format ``'foo.bar.baz'``) for which this site is an admin. The admin site uses this in its automatically-introspected documentation of models, views and template tags.
This marks up the following header as the "canonical" target for the setting ADMIN_FOR This means any time I talk about ADMIN_FOR, I can reference it using :setting:`ADMIN_FOR`.
That's basically how everything fits together.
The work is mostly done, but here's what's left, in rough order of priority.
Fix up generic view docs: adapt Chapter 9 of the Django Book (consider this TODO item my permission and license) into topics/generic-views.txt; remove the intro material from ref/generic-views.txt and just leave the function reference.
Change the "Added/changed in development version" callouts to proper Sphinx .. versionadded:: or .. versionchanged:: directives.
Check for and fix malformed links. Do this by running make linkcheck and fix all of the 300+ errors/warnings.
In particular, look at all the relative links; these need to be changed to proper references.
Most of the various index.txt documents have very short or even non-existent intro text. Each of those documents needs a good short intro the content below that point.
The glossary is very perfunctory. It needs to be filled out.
Add more metadata targets: there's lots of places that look like:
``File.close()`` ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
... these should be:
.. method:: File.close()
That is, use metadata instead of titles.
Add more links -- nearly everything that's an inline code literal right now can probably be turned into a xref.
See the literals_to_xrefs.py file in _ext -- it's a shell script to help do this work.
This will probably be a continuing, never-ending project.
Add info field lists where appropriate.
Add .. code-block:: <lang> to literal blocks so that they get highlighted.
Some hints for making things look/read better:
Whenever possible, use links. So, use :setting:`ADMIN_FOR` instead of ``ADMIN_FOR``.
Some directives (.. setting::, for one) are prefix-style directives; they go before the unit they're describing. These are known as "crossref" directives. Others (.. class::, e.g.) generate their own markup; these should go inside the section they're describing. These are called "description units".
You can tell which are which by looking at in _ext/djangodocs.py; it registers roles as one of the other.
When referring to classes/functions/modules, etc., you'll want to use the fully-qualified name of the target (:class:`django.contrib.contenttypes.models.ContentType`).
Since this doesn't look all that awesome in the output -- it shows the entire path to the object -- you can prefix the target with a ~ (that's a tilde) to get just the "last bit" of that path. So :class:`~django.contrib.contenttypes.models.ContentType` will just display a link with the title "ContentType".
Aug 31, 2012