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  • David Hoffman 6 posts 76 karma points
    May 25, 2016 @ 16:09
    David Hoffman
    0

    Starter kit to create documentation?

    Greetings from a newbie. I am having a hard time searching for what I need because my keyword ("documentation") is so common.

    I would like to use Umbraco to provide documentation for an application I wrote. Is there a starter kit that uses a typical layout, with table of contents panel on the left synchronized to text and graphics on the right?

    Ideally, it would look like the Umbraco documentation on this site.

    Many thanks for any feedback.

  • Jan Skovgaard 11280 posts 23678 karma points MVP 11x admin c-trib
    May 25, 2016 @ 16:48
    Jan Skovgaard
    0

    Hi David and welcome to the Umbraco developer forum also known as "Our" :)

    Hmm, I'm thinking that perhaps you can find some inspiration by having a look at the "Umbraco bookshelf" package by Kevin Giszewski - He did this one when he worked at a university where they switched to using Umbraco as their CMS and they needed to have some documentation ready by hand I think.

    You can find the package here https://our.umbraco.org/projects/backoffice-extensions/bookshelf/ and you can see the package repository here https://github.com/kgiszewski/UmbracoBookshelf and if I remember correctly the content for the books are fetched somehow from this repository https://github.com/kgiszewski/LearnUmbraco7

    This is also based on the bookshelf approach I think https://our.umbraco.org/projects/backoffice-extensions/v7-editors-manual-bookshelf-edition/ - Maybe a source of inspiration.

    I think they keyword is "markdown" :)

    I hope this helps?

    /Jan

  • David Hoffman 6 posts 76 karma points
    May 25, 2016 @ 17:33
    David Hoffman
    0

    Thanks so much for the quick response! I shall investigate.

  • Nicholas Westby 2054 posts 7104 karma points c-trib
    May 25, 2016 @ 17:40
    Nicholas Westby
    0

    FYI, I don't think Bookshelf is necessarily the right solution for you in this case.

    Bookshelf is useful to provide documentation to people who are logged into the Umbraco back office. It sounds like you want a website that displays documentation without a login being required.

    Have you considered Read the Docs?: https://readthedocs.org/

    Ditto uses it and it sounds like what you want: http://umbraco-ditto.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

  • David Hoffman 6 posts 76 karma points
    May 25, 2016 @ 19:13
    David Hoffman
    0

    Yes, Read The Docs is superb and I would love to use it. But it's for open source only, correct? My documentation project is for a client. (And will need to be hosted at the client site.)

    I think you may be right about Bookshelf but I haven't had a chance to look yet. I'm familiar with Markdown but really want the rich text editing goodness of Umbraco for this project.

    Thanks very much for your input.

  • Nicholas Westby 2054 posts 7104 karma points c-trib
    May 25, 2016 @ 19:26
    Nicholas Westby
    0

    Looks like readthedocs.org is only for public repos, but readthedocs.com (notice the TLD) can be used for private repositories on GitHub or BitBucket: https://readthedocs.com/features/

    I'm not aware of an Umbraco starter kit that does what you want. However, it would be fairly trivial to implement one. You essentially need to do four things:

    • Configure the doctypes.
    • Render a menu on the left.
    • Render rich text on the right.
    • Style everything.

    Should take only a few hours.

  • David Hoffman 6 posts 76 karma points
    May 25, 2016 @ 19:41
    David Hoffman
    0

    Thanks very much, Nicholas. You're probably giving me too much credit for being able to achieve what you call trivial, but I'll give it a go. :)

  • Nicholas Westby 2054 posts 7104 karma points c-trib
    May 25, 2016 @ 20:10
    Nicholas Westby
    0

    If you want a leg up on the styling, here's something you might consider: http://startbootstrap.com/template-overviews/simple-sidebar/

  • David Hoffman 6 posts 76 karma points
    May 25, 2016 @ 21:57
    David Hoffman
    0

    Thanks for the link, and the encouragement!

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