README

Integrates a full suite of documentation direct into your Winter CMS installation. Documentation can be generated from Markdown files or analysed from PHP code.

Features

Generate documentation locally from your plugin, or from a remote ZIP file.
Create content-based documentation from Markdown files.
Create API documentation from PHP doc-blocks and parsed PHP code.
Can be used in both the Backend and CMS.

Getting started

To install the plugin, you may install it through the Winter CMS Marketplace, or you may install it using Composer:

composer require winter/wn-docs-plugin

Then, run the migrations to ensure the plugin is enabled:

php artisan winter:up

Registering documentation

Documentation can be registered by adding a registerDocumentation method to your Plugin class (Plugin.php), and will depend on whether the documentation is content-based or API-based, and whether the documentation or code is stored locally or remotely.

<?php

class MyPlugin extends \System\Classes\PluginBase
{
    // ...

    public function registerDocumentation()
    {
        return [
            'guide' => [
                'name' => 'Documentation Guide',
                'type' => 'user',
                'source' => 'local',
                'path' => 'docs'
            ],
        ];
    }

    // ...
}

The method should return an array, with the key of each item representing the "code" of the documentation, and the following parameters in an array as the value:

For API documentation (ie. the type parameter is php), there are a couple of extra parameters that may be specified:

Types of Documentation

The Docs plugin currently supports two types of documentation, Markdown (md) and PHP (php).

Markdown

Markdown is used for the generation of textual and image-based documentation, allowing for the easy writing of large amounts of documentation in a short amount of time. The Markdown documentation processor uses the CommonMark library to ensure accurate parsing of Markdown and the enabling of these useful features:

Auto-linking of web and email addresses
Automatic table of contents generation and anchor tags
External link handling
Front matter (title and meta definition)
Markdown tables

Markdown documentation can be arranged in any way you see fit - the main table of contents can be specific in a .yaml file available within the documentation source.

Example table of contents YAML file

rootPage: home
sections:
    Introduction:
        pages:
            welcome: "Welcome"

    Functionality:
        pages:
            functionality/cool-stuff: "Cool Stuff"
            functionality/big-things: "Big Things"

Example Markdown document

---
title: Big Things
---

# Big Things

We have some big things available in this software.

## Awesome Feature One

This feature allows you to reach a new level of awesome.

PHP

PHP documentation involves parsing a PHP source code directory and determining the available API within all the source code objects, such as classes, namespaces, properties and methods.

Using the awesome PHP Parser library, the code is analyzed and derived from the signatures of all aspects of a class, as well as doc-blocks written to provide additional context for those signatures.

This allows, for example, the following class:

<?php

namespace Acme\Blog;

use MarkdownParser;

class Post extends \BasePost
{
    public string $title;

    public string $content;

    /**
     * Whether the post is published or not
     */
    protected boolean $published = false;

    /**
     * Renders the post and returns an array
     *
     * @return array Title and content
     */
    public function render()
    {
        return [
            'title' => $this->title,
            'content' => MarkdownParser::parse($this->content),
        ];
    }
}

To be rendered into a readable documentation that outlines the available properties ($title, $content) and method (render()) as readable documentation.

winter / wn-docs-plugin

Maintainers

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