evanwong / cordova-docs

Mirror of Apache Cordova docs

Apache Cordova API Documentation

The JavaScript API documentation for Apache Cordova.

The documentation is available at docs.cordova.io.

Documentation Format

All of the Apache Cordova documentation is written with markdown, a lightweight markup language that can be typeset to HTML. Markdown provides a simple and flexible way to document Cordova's core API and platform-specific APIs.

File Structure

docs/
docs/LANGUAGE
docs/LANGUAGE/VERSION
docs/LANGUAGE/VERSION/cordova/
docs/LANGUAGE/VERSION/cordova/PluginName/
docs/LANGUAGE/VERSION/cordova/PluginName/className.md
docs/LANGUAGE/VERSION/cordova/PluginName/className.functionName.md

Contributing to the Documentation

Report or Fix an Issue

We use Apache JIRA

By the way, you rock! Thanks for helping us improve the documentation!

Using Git

Are you new to Git or contributing on GitHub?

We have written a few Git tutorials to help you get started with contributing to the documentation.

Sending Pull Requests

Pull requests are welcome!

We appreciate the use of topic branches.

git checkout -b issue_23

# code

git commit -m "Issue 23: Fix a bad bug."

git push origin issue_23

# send pull request from branch issue_23 to cordova:master

Adding a Language

Do you want the Apache Cordova documentation in another language? We do too!

1. Create the language directory

# Spanish
mkdir docs/es

2. Add a version

Start with the latest stable release. You can always add other versions later.

mkdir docs/es/1.0.0

3. Begin Translating

Currently, English is the most up-to-date and so it is easiest to copy each English file into the new language directory.

4. config.json

For each version, there is a config.json that defines the name of the language and how to merge the files.

5. Customizing HTML template

Each language can override the default template in template/docs/LANGUAGE.

Editorial Guidelines

Please see the STYLESHEET.md file for guildelines on language and usage.

Generating the Documentation

Quick Preview

When making minor edits, it is usually safe to simply render the edited from Markdown to HTML. Many code editors have plugins to render Markdown to HTML and there are a handful of good online editors.

Currently, a Ruby script and joDoc are used to generate the HTML documentation.

Install joDoc

• Clone joDoc

    git clone http://github.com/davebalmer/joDoc.git
  

• Add joDoc/ to your path

  Open ~/.bashrc or ~/.profile (or whatever you use)

    export PATH=$PATH:~/path/to/joDoc/
  

• Install markdown

    # Use your package manager
    brew install markdown
  

• Install nokogiri (Ruby HTML parser)

    gem install nokogiri
  

• Install json (Ruby JSON parser)

    gem install json
  

Run the Script

bin/generate

If all you want to generate is edge/English, then

bin/generate --edge

Problems

Generated a Version Release

There is a Rake task to increment the version, generate the version directory, and update the edge documentation.

# generate version 1.7.0
rake version[1.7.0]

FAQ

Error while running ./bin/generate

If you get the following error:

./bin/../lib/cordova/navigation_menu.rb:14:in `read': can't convert nil into String (TypeError)
    from ./bin/../lib/cordova/navigation_menu.rb:14:in `initialize'
    from ./bin/../lib/docs_generator.rb:86:in `new'
    from ./bin/../lib/docs_generator.rb:86:in `after_jodoc'
    from ./bin/../lib/docs_generator.rb:55:in `run'
    from ./bin/../lib/docs_generator.rb:45:in `foreach'
    from ./bin/../lib/docs_generator.rb:45:in `run'
    from ./bin/../lib/docs_generator.rb:41:in `foreach'
    from ./bin/../lib/docs_generator.rb:41:in `run'
    from ./bin/generate:6

You may need to add the following line to the joDoc script:

$markdown_bin = "/path/to/Markdown.pl";

For more details, see the Issue #590.