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Hey there this is Mark, founder of modmore
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and in this video I'm going to quickly show how you can help with editing the new MODX documentation
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First things first, this is the documentation
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I'm referring to
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which is currently available on docs.modx.org
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which is different from the version that
runs on docs.modx.com
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it's basically a community project we've
been working on
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to convert the documentation to the
markdown format
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and hosting those on github to allow
open and transparent collaboration
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to make it better
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it's still under active development, so
if you watch this later you may notice
some things have changed
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in the design or overall structure
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but this is basically what we're looking
at today
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so let's see how this works, how we can
make a change to this documentation
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let's say we were browsing the extras
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and we were looking at the
addHeaderfiles snippet
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and we noticed that this table here
doesn't look right
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the first column is missing, it seems to
have shifted
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and this is actually a result of the
conversion which happened
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on some pages which we can
quite easily fix
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to do that we'll find the "Edit this page"
link which is located both here in the
title as well as in the footer
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and this will open a new page on github
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You do need a github account, which is
free if you don't already have one
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and I'll just login as my test account
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just so it's the same way it will be for
you the first time you edit something
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So the first thing it asks me for is to
fork the repository.
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If you're not familiar with how git or git
flow and all that works, no worries.
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Just click the green button which
will basically make a copy of the
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official documentation that you can make
changes to directly.
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The official version, which is under the
modxorg name, not everyone can change
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that directly, so forking is the way to
start making changes.
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So I'll fork it.
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Which will land us in the edit view.
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It immediately sends us to the right page,
the addHeaderfiles extra.
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We can now look at what happened with
that table.
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So this is roughly how a table is managed
in markdown.
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There are these pipe symbols (|)
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and then there's content in the cell
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another pipe symbol, more content
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this is basically the separation between
the header and the body of a table
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and then there's the rest
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so the problem here is actually,
may be a bit hard to see
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but there's a space before each line
of the table
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that's causing it to not get rendered
properly
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so what i'll do is, I'll just select
all the lines and do a shift-tab
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which puts everything nicely in the
right place
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and while we're at it, we could also make
other changes
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I mean we could check the content, is it
written properly?
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maybe there are some formatting issues?
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I guess there's some code here that should
be wrapped in these little quotes
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to make sure they're formatted as code
as well
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so basically you can edit the entire page
content just from this view
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When you're happy with this, you need to
save the changes.
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That's called a "commit" in git terms.
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But you can do that just from the bottom
here where it says "Propose file change"
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So we can say "fix formatting issues on
addHeaderFiles page"
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You can add an additional description here
but that's not necessary
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We'll click the green button to propose
the file change
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That sends us into a view where we can
compare the changes we made
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to the official version.
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So we can see here the base repository
is Docs under modxorg, and ours is
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Mark-H2 with a certain branch name
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So we can see what we did, removed some
spaces and added some formatting
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at the bottom
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Now the next step is to click "Create Pull
Request"
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So as we are working in our own fork,
in our own copy
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the pull request is basically where you
ask maintainers of the official version
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like "this is the change I made, can you
please include it in the official version"
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So we can just click that button which
will give us a new form to fill out
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basically the information needed by the
maintainers to see if it's a good change
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or not
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So we can describe this as
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"Some formatting issues on addHeaderFIles
Page causing table to not render properly"
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which affects version 2.x
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cause we do have different versions in
the documentation now
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and we don't have a relevant issue
for this one
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So this is basically what we need
to fill out
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At this point the maintainers of the
project get a notification
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that there's a new change
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I can actually show you what that
looks like
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when I'm bringing my other screen
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So this is the same repository except now
I'm logged in as my main user account
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and I can see that Mark-H2, who is a
first-time contributor
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has suggested some changes
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I can review them through the files tab
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and when I say "okay this is a good
change, something we really need"
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I can merge it from here.
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So I'll confirm that and at this point the
change is made in the official version
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What happens next is that the change needs
to be deployed which is semi-automatic
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it will be fully automatic soon
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So it looks like it's completed (the deployment)
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so now I can go back to my
documentation
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and if I refresh the page
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you will see that it is now a little
bit better
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there are still some formatting issues
here where it's breaking up the line
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but that's a design thing that needs to
be addressed differently
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you can see that the other change we made
here, properly marking these as code
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did apply properly
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So that's basically the process for
editing the documentation.
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You can go to anywhere on this website
to find the edit page link
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to get directly to the right page
on GitHub
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If you go to Github you can also browse
the documentation from there
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You can see we currently have English,
Dutch and Russian versions
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English is the source version
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the others are translations, and
especially Russian is coming along nicely
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We can just browse around here and say
okay maybe I want to change something
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in... I don't know.. the api reference
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which is not a very interesting page
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but then there's the edit link right here
at the top
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that will again bring us to the same
page we saw before
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where we can edit the page, edit the
source of the page, and propose
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the change at the bottom which will
send us into the pull request
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for the process of getting it merged
into the official version
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I do want to encourage everybody to
just see if you can help out with this
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there are a couple of issues logged
on github as well
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with things that have been identified
as needing to be fixed
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Thanks for watching
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I hope this shows how you can help out,
how you can contribute to the new docs
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without needing to know all about how
git works
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just the basics of changing a file and
submitting it to be included