Roadmap / Documentation and help roadmap

Documentation and help roadmap

Exponential's documentation now lives in three places that are kept in step. The help system inside the administration answers questions where they come up. The documentation set in English and German ships with every release. The doc.exponential.earth portal publishes all of it, together with the documentation of earlier generations that is preserved under the GNU licenses. This page is the plan for all three.

The help system in the administration

  • Delivered (development branch, ships with Exponential 6.0.15): the in-admin help system, exphelp. Every administration page has its help. A help center offers search, manuals for many audiences (administrators, editors, developers, designers, translators and more), a user manual with one question per page, and the documentation of every active extension.
  • Delivered (development branch, ships with Exponential 6.0.15): help maintained as content. Help topics are content objects that can be edited, translated, versioned and reviewed like any other content, in every language of the help. A help dashboard lists the topics overdue for review.
  • Delivered (development branch, ships with Exponential 6.0.15): e-books of the help manuals in EPUB and PDF, stored as content and rebuilt on each release, and an export of the help as DITA 1.3.
  • Delivered (development branch, ships with Exponential 6.0.15): help standards. Clear titles, a Standards section, a catalogue of the design patterns, and checks of the help notices and identifiers in the code.
  • In progress: more audiences. Pages for the press, media and influencers, with a landing page, and the further waves of the help plan.
  • Considering: help in the site design. Help from the expwt sidebar for editors who work on the site itself.

The documentation set (English and German)

  • Delivered: in the public repository, the documentation set moved to locale-named directories, doc/eng-us and doc/ger-de. It has features, guides, specifications, standards, installation, upgrade and history pages, and a page for every language.
  • Delivered: a feature page for each new feature of 6.0.15. Among them are the Smarty and Twig template guides, the Exponential Velocity pages, admin4 and its styling, the audit trail, content jobs, the log viewer and the Content Security Policy.
  • Delivered: the project files in the help: README, security policy and contributing guidelines. The contributing guidelines state the copyright assignment under the CLA 1.1.0.
  • In progress: the German documentation brought level with the English documentation.
  • Considering: a guide for each command of the console, with examples that are tested on every release.

The doc.exponential.earth portal

  • Delivered: doc.exponential.earth, the documentation portal of Exponential 6 and the Platform distributions.
  • Delivered: the documentation of earlier generations, preserved under the GNU licenses it was published under.
  • Next: the portal publishes the documentation set of each release and the help manuals and e-books of 6.0.15, so the same text is in the product and online.
  • Next: a new section of the portal for the Platform distributions: Platform Legacy, Nexus, DXP, Exponential Platform and Exponential Basic.
  • Considering: the static pages of the portal imported into Exponential as content, with comments from readers and a simpler way to maintain them.
  • Considering: video guides.

Help wanted

  • Write a tutorial for a task you know well: a first site, a site package, a template in Twig or Smarty, a Velocity deploy.
  • Translate the help into your language. Help topics are content, so they can be translated in the administration.
  • Report a wrong or outdated page in the issue tracker or send a pull request to the documentation in the Exponential repository.
  • Collaborate on the portal: tell us in the Developer forum if you would like to help rebuild doc.exponential.earth as a site built with Exponential.