develop

Developer Documentation for Developer Site

This folder holds article source files for publishing to the Developer Site (dev site). The articles are divided into the following sets (or documents):

• Learning Paths: Articles that guide you through the fundamentals of developing applications to meet your user's needs.
• Tutorials: Articles that comprehensively teach you how to use Liferay's APIs and frameworks.

The documents are comprised of article source files in Markdown format, that follow the MultiMarkdown syntax. Images referenced in the document articles are to be stored in each document's images/ folder. Document sources are stored in directories that map to their developer site locations.

Here is a summary of the liferay-docs repository directory structure, as it relates to dev site documentation:

• liferay-docs/
  • build.properties
  • build.username.properties
  • build-site-common.xml (primary buildfile for dev site documentation)
  • release-site.properties (properties for creating document Zip files for a release)
  • develop/ (maps to the site's Develop tab)
    • build.xml
    • tutorial-template.markdown (template for tutorial articles)
    • learning-paths/ (Learning Paths document folder. Has a directory structure similar to that of the tutorials/ document folder.)
    • new-articles/ (Submit new tutorial article Markdown files, images, and code here)
    • tutorials/ (Tutorials document folder)
      • build.xml
      • articles/
        • some-category/ (category folder named after the title of its dev site navigation)
          • some-article.markdown (named after the article's <h1> heading)
          • another-article.markdown
          • ...
        • another-category/
        • ...
      • build/ (generated when building articles locally)
      • code/ (code examples mapped to the document's articles)
        • some-category/ (use abbreviated category name to keep code path short)
          • begin/ (optional. Can refer to the start/end of another tutorial's code if it makes sense.)
            • some-portlet (the plugin on starting the tutorial)
          • end/
            • some-portlet (the plugin on finishing the tutorial)
        • ...
      • dist/ (generated when building the Zip file of all of the document's articles and images, for importing to the dev site)
      • drawings/ (internal source files, such as .odg files, for drawings)
      • images/ (image files used in the document's articles)
      • build.xml
  • guidelines/ (instructions on writing articles, using tools, following Markdown conventions, etc.)
  • lib/ (internal JARs used by the custom Ant tasks)

Now that you know the "lay of the land", let's learn how to add new articles.

Contributing

You can save your new tutorial article Markdown text, images, and code to the develop/new-articles/ folder. We'll move your tutorial to a proper location under learning-paths/ or tutorials/, review your tutorial, and publish it to the site.

Then send a pull request to user liferay on the appropriate branch.

Here are the branches for the respective product releases:

• Liferay Portal 6.2 CE/EE - master
• Liferay Portal 6.1 CE/EE - 6.1.x

As you write your article, make sure to follow the Liferay Documentation Writer's Guidelines and our Markdown Tips. You can edit your Markdown files using your favorite editor. Many editors, like jEdit, have Markdown plugins for highlighting its syntax. For tips on configuring jEdit, see Editing Markdown Files.

From time to time as you write your article, you'll probably want to see how it renders in HTML. Next we'll show you how to convert it from Markdown to HTML.

Rendering an Existing Markdown Article File Locally as HTML

To see what a local article looks like converted from Markdown to HTML, you can use our Ant build targets and the Pandoc Markdown parsing application.

Here's how to build an HTML version of a Tutorials article from the terminal:

1. cd liferay-docs/develop/tutorials

2. Execute the article-to-html target passing the article's relative path as the article property value. Below is an example of executing this command on the 01-using-liferay-ui-success-and-error-messages.markdown file that resides in the 21-liferayui-taglibs category folder.

   ant article-to-html -Darticle=articles/liferayui-taglibs/using-liferay-ui-success-and-error-messages.markdown
   

   Hint: You can leverage your terminal's auto-complete feature when specifying the article path.

3. The HTML file is produced to the corresponding folder under build/ (e.g., build/articles/liferayui-taglibs/using-liferay-ui-success-and-error-messages.markdown.html).

It's just that easy!