How to contribute to the project's documentation

Index

This page is included in an attempt to provide some standard guidelines for the naming and formatting used in the development of Geronimo's documentation. This will help us all to maintain a consistent look and feel throughout the entire documentation and Geronimo spaces.

First of all, get familiar with Confluence markup, see the Notation Help. You may also find this guide useful.

For comments and/or concern, please join our mailing list and post your inquires there.

This document is organized in the following sections:

IMPORTANT When making a reference to any document in the wiki you should point to this autoexported HTML content, avoid pointing directly to Confluence content. If the page you are browsing does not have the Geronimo banner on top then you are not looking at the HTML version. Good: http://cwiki.apache.org/geronimo/geronimo-cwiki-documentation-architecture.html Bad: http://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/geronimo/Tips+for+writing+and+formatting+documentation Tip: One way to get back to the HTML version of the page you just edited is to navigate to that particular page from http://cwiki.apache.org/geronimo . Refer to Geronimo cwiki documentation architecture for further details.

Use {scrollbar}

Every time you create a new page add at the top the {scrollbar} macro unless that page is (and will remain that way) the only child page of it's parent.

Installation paths

For installation paths use something like this:

<geronimo_home>/
<sampleApp_home>/
<JBoss_home>/
<WAS_home>/
<WLS_home>/
...

Versions

For versions use:

Apache Geronimo v1.0
Apache Geronimo v1.1
Apache Geronimo v1.1.1
JBoss v4
Tomcat v5.5.9

Ultimately v1.0 or v1.1, the lower case "v" always precede the number.

File extensions

For reference to file extensions use:

.zip
.tar
.gz
.gzip
.jar
.war

Make sure to include the "."

Images

To display an image proceed this way:

• Attach the image file first.
• Avoid blank spaces in the file name.
• in a new line reference the image !file_name.gif! optionally for flow charts you can use center alignment !file_name.gif|align=center!.

To create the diagram you could use any presentation software such as OpenOffice (http://www.openoffice.org) and export the slide as JPG and then attach it to the documentation page. THIS IS THE PREFERRED METHOD.

Alternatively you could use the "Add Diagram" option to build one chart online. This option depends on a plugin and uses a web based interface to create the various diagrams. For additional information on this plugin visit:

http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/CONFEXT/Gliffy+Plugin+for+Confluence+-+Diagram+and+draw+in+Confluence

Command samples

For command samples, as in a command line window use:

*{{sample command}}*

The result will look like this:

sample command

Use a new line when possible.

Unformatted plain text

For unformatted, plain text samples use:

The result will look like this:

sample text

Code formatting

The current version of Confluence supports color coding for XML, Java, JavaScript, HTML, SQL and ActionScript. Here are some examples for those formats likely to be used in Geronimo's doumentation.

{code:XML|borderStyle=solid|title=some_title}
XML code
{code}

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<web-app xmlns="http://geronimo.apache.org/xml/ns/j2ee/web-1.2">
    <environment>
        <moduleId>
            <groupId>sample.applications</groupId>
            <artifactId>SampledApp</artifactId>
            <version>2.0</version>
            <type>war</type>
        </moduleId>             
    </environment>
    <context-root>/sample</context-root>
</web-app>

{code:JAVA|borderStyle=solid|title=file_name}
Java Code
{code}

package org.apache.geronimo.samples.sampleapp;

import java.awt.Dimension;
import java.awt.Toolkit;
import java.awt.event.ActionEvent;
import java.awt.event.ActionListener;
import java.util.Hashtable;

// ...

{code:JavaScript|borderStyle=solid|title=file_name}
JavaScript code
{code}

    <script language="JavaScript">
        function showBreadcrumbsEllipsis()
        {
            document.getElementById('breadcrumbsEllipsis').style.display = 'none';
            document.getElementById('breadcrumbsExpansion').style.display = 'inline';
        }
    </script>

{code:ActionScript|borderStyle=solid|title=file_name}
HTML Code
{code}

<html>
<head>
    <title>Page title</title>
</head>
<body text="#000000" link="#000000" vlink="#666666">
    <h1> Some title </h1>
        <p> Some text... </p>
        ....
</body>
</html>

{code:SQL|borderStyle=solid|title=file_name}
SQL Code
{code}

CREATE TABLE customer(
        CUST_ID VARCHAR(15) PRIMARY KEY,
        CUST_NAME VARCHAR(40)   
);

INSERT INTO customer(CUST_ID,CUST_NAME) VALUES('12345','Your_Name');

Command samples and results

For command samples and results as a command line screen capture use:

The result will look like this:

d:\geronimo-jetty6-jee5-2.0-M2>ls -l
total 195
-rwx------+   1 user  None         4114 Jan 27 00:12 DISCLAIMER.txt
-rwx------+   1 user  None       144208 Jan 27 00:12 LICENSE.txt
-rwx------+   1 user  None        31741 Jan 27 00:12 NOTICE.txt
-rwx------+   1 user  None        17697 Jan 27 00:12 RELEASE-NOTES-2.0-M2.TXT
drwx------+   3 user  None            0 Feb  6 09:20 bin
drwx------+   2 user  None            0 Feb  5 14:34 deploy
drwx------+   3 user  None            0 Jan 27 00:12 lib
drwx------+  48 user  None            0 Feb  5 14:36 repository
drwx------+   2 user  None            0 Jan 27 00:12 schema
drwx------+  10 user  None            0 Feb  5 14:34 var

Commands in paragraph

For commands or code within a paragraph use:

sample text in the paragraph {{command}} sample text in the paragraph {{some_java_code}}.

The result will look like this:

"sample text in the paragraph command sample text in the paragraph some_java_code."

Special notes

For special notes to bring reader's attention use the already existing standard macros such as:

{note}Message goes here.{note}
{warning}Warning message goes here.{warning}
{info}Info message goes here.{info}
{tip}Tips goe here.{tip}

When necessary, you can also add a title to these boxes, for example:

{warning:title=Warning}Warning message goes here.{warning}

The result will look like these:

Note title Message goes here.

Info title Info message goes here.

Tip title Tips goe here.

Warning title Warning message goes here.

Spell checking

Currently, Confluence does not provide spell check so you should use the method of your choice to perform spell checking.

Mac OS X users can simply right-click on text areas and select Spelling -> Check Spelling as You Type.

Firefox 2.0 provides a built-in spell-checking, older versions of Firefox can get a plugin to fill in the gap.