Contributing Docs
Community projects aim to deliver at a minimum the following documents together with each General Availability (GA) release:
- Javadoc for the public API
- Reference Guide
To see the documentation available for each project use the links on the Project Matrix or visit the project pages.
Note: Information found in the wiki typically compliments project documentation by addressing specific use-cases or configurations.
Making a contribution
Most community documentation is created using DocBook so that it can easily be presented in different formats or styles. For example we typically produce single-page HTML, multiple-page HTML and PDF formats of the Reference Guides. Different styles are used to make the material more attractive or to highlight new releases.
PressGang is the centralized hub you can use to get assistance with professional open source documentation using DocBook XML. The JBoss Documentation Guide is the canonical reference for JBoss developers and content authors.
Since documentation needs to be developed in a structured way, to coincide with each project release, it is stored in a version control repository. To make a documentation contribution you therefore need to submit a patch. If you submit a substantial number of patches, or you create a particularly useful piece of documentation, then you may be offered commit access to the repository to make your own changes.
Some projects wants community to contribute directly to documentation without the upskill time required to learn DocBook XML to the required level, or they want to seek heavy collaboration during documentation authoring. In these cases, DocBook XML may not be the best choice for project.
The JBoss Community Team offers an online Project Documentation Editor (Confluence) that allows individual contributors and teams to quickly contribute community documentation using a web-based interface and clearly defined wiki markup. The Authoring Guide describes which wiki markup to use, how to export it to DocBook XML, and how to transform the DocBook XML into a structure suitable for storing in a version control repository and publishing.