Extension talk:MintyDocs

Hey Yaron, I hope all good and happy belated holidays.

Recently I am assigned to a task that periodically I need to download a version of a documentation and send it stake-holders to be digitally signed. Given that Book and MwLib not working anymore, my only option seems to be either Print dialog and save as pdf or use HtmlDoc along with PdfDoc to export pages in html format then convert to pdf. But this is a lot of manual work.

It is not directly related to mintydocs but is there any way I can query all the pages in of a certain version of manual and display them on a single page with template?

If you store all the MintyDocs information via either Cargo or SMW, you can do that - you just need to use the "embedded" format for either one of them. I recommend never calling the MintyDocs parser functions directly, but instead them wrapping them in templates and calling those templates - which makes it easy to also do the storage.

Hi Yaron, I have been trying trying to figure out this for days now and still did not succeed. I have also installed Canasta with Tech Docs addon ( simply creates all the categories, forms and templates for minty docs ). My problem is as in instructions, I created Product Page, then version as sub page. I can see versions listed in Product page. Then I created Manual Page under version. Version also shows manuals. All good until this point. But in manual page if I create the list of topics, doesn't show anything. When I debug the code, getPossiblyInheritedParam and getInheritedParam functions gets called and they return null for $paramValues null for MintyDocsTopicsList. I tried to add topics in Manual Page and/or as sub page of Manual but still couldn't figure out how to do this part. If you can add a short usage example either here or in repo that would be great. Thanks for your help

Hi - you can see an example of a MintyDocs topic page here, and the associated manual page is here. in both cases, the pages call the respective MintyDocs parser function through a template.

It's great that you tried out the Canasta Tech Docs package! Although it's unfortunate that the topics stuff isn't working for you. I don't know if that's an error in your implementation, or in the package, or in MintyDocs itself. We're actually planning to add another package, this one of a sample set of documentation pages that use the main "Tech Docs" package - which will hopefully make the MintyDocs stuff easier to understand, and maybe uncover any bugs that exist.

As for the problem you're currently seeing - could it be that you didn't actually create the page for each topic?

Hi Yaron, I think I figured out the issue. The theme I was using ( Timeless ) seems to be not supporting sidebarTOC so even though I create the topics nothing was shown. I did some modification and now able to generate a toc.

My other question will be usage of ToC links. So in some cases I have a top level topic with barely any content but several sub-topics with content. Is there a way to link all those sub topics to single page. For instance

....

2. General Overview and Design Guidelines & Approach

2.1 General Overview

2.2 Assumptions & Constraints & Risks

2.2.1 Assumptions

2.2.2 Constraints

2.2.3 Risks

2.3 Alignment with Federal Laws

.....

on above topics `2. General Overview and Design Guidelines & Approach` doesn't have any content. but sub topics has. Instead of creating a page for this, can I link this page to General Overview?

or add 2.1 General Overview, 2.2 , 2.3 contents in 2. General Overview and Design Guidelines & Approach but link the sub items in TOC to General Overview page?

I don't think there's any way to do that kind of customization, unfortunately.

That's what I thought. Looking at implementation in php code, it can be done where it checks if a page exists or not. It may check if is there a pipe ( | ) character exists then link to first part use text as second part ( similar to how MediaWiki:Sidebar page works )

Another unrelated question. I created different groups for different departments with assigned admin, editor, reviewer permissions. I couldn't really find any information if it is possible to limit tokens field with users assigned to those groups. I am using SMW and with Page_Forms I can get all users by either

`{{{field|Admins|input type=tokens|values from namespace=User}}}`

or

`{{{field|Admins|input type=tokens|values from query=((:User:+))}}}`

which brings all users but I couldn't figure out a way to filter down users who are assigned in one of those permissions ( admin, editor, previewer ). Is there any way to do it in filters or does this need to be implemented in code base?

No, there's no way to do that, unless the group information is stored via (in your case) SMW.

Yeah I figured. Unless there is some code changes it seems to be not possible. Totally sidetrack, after installing Canasta, I noticed few things doesn't work as it is in documentation. It might be an error on my end with configuration, One of them is there is no Special page for creating drafts. When I try to load that page by url it says there is no special page such as that. But I can see in source codes. Probably something missing. Another one is, probably indirectly related, if I go Draft:PageName and create the page all seems to be working for existing pages, but when I publish ( PageName exists or not ) it shows the list of items will be published but somehow it doesn't update the pages. for instance if I create Draft:FirstManual, and add {{Manual}} in it, then save. it works as expected as Draft page. When I click on Publish, it shows FirstManual and checkboxes then after I confirm I get a note says /wiki/FirstManual page will be created/updated. but when I go to the page, it doesn't transferred any content from Draft page. I need to re-check if it is only non-existing pages or existing ones too. but definitely not for first-time publishing.

For the first issue - what was the page you were trying to load?

I was following this instruction

"For pages that don't yet have a draft page, but for which you want to create a draft page, you can go to Special:MintyDocsCreatePage/PageName and create that draft page or pages. It works essentially the same as "publishing", but going the other way, and it can only be done if the target page does not exist yet."

I created a page called TestPage. then tried to load Special:MintyDocsCreatePage/TestPage returns

No such special page

Page actions

• Refresh

You have requested an invalid special page.

A list of valid special pages can be found at Special pages.

Return to Main Page.

Sorry about that - that was an error in the documentation, that was there for five years! The page is actually Special:MintyDocsCreateDraft, not Special:MintyDocsCreatePage. I just fixed it, finally.

We have tried to figure out but we hadn't had any luck and couldn't wrap our heads on how to get it working, so more information will be gladly accepted!

Do what?

Use the mintydocs plugin as a whole

What did you try, and what didn't work?

How do we define structures? pages? anything? Just the whole basics we couldn't get working

I'm not sure how to answer that. Were you able to at least create a product page? That's the basis for everything else.

We weren't able to figure out how to even start creating product pages, could you send a guide or detail what we need to do in order to use the plugin?

To create a product page, pick any page and add the call {{#mintydocs_product:}} to it. It can take various parameters, but all of them are optional.

It seems that adding permissions doesn't work. We tried {{#mintydocs_product:test1 editors=JustAPlenguin}}

What is "test1" doing there?

The name of the product no?

No, the name of the product is set by the page name - or by the "display name=" parameter, if it's set. Do you know how parser functions in MediaWiki work?

I got it

Now another thing that arises, is it possible to make tabs? Like you have uptop an option to click and it changes the page? couldn't find if there was

Also, is it possible to have users click on a page and not have the big popup text saying "Click on any of the following to see the documentation for that version:"

Sorry, I didn't understand the question about the tabs. What tabs would you want to have?

As for that text - MintyDocs defines pages within the structure "product > version > manual > topic". What structure do you want within your wiki?

Okay, you click on a page you are in the 4.0 tab, then you have an option to go to the 3.0 tab, I want to do that, how would I go on doing that?

Hi folks, I am interested in MintyDocs, but as only a noob in MediaWiki (i.e. an occasional content editor and translator) I would like to inspect real-life examples. Are there some?

Thx!

The only public wiki I know of that uses MintyDocs is the Genesys Multicloud CX wiki; here's a manual page, for example.

Page Forms extension is required, otherwise draft cannot be published. I think it should be mentioned in section "Download and installation".

Sorry about that! That was not intentional. I just checked in a fix, so now MintyDocs does not call Page Forms code.

Hello,

Is it possible to use String instead of Numbers to define versions: for example Alpha is the first one, Beta is the second one.

Regards

JMU

Yes - versions can have any name. The only downside to using strings is that the ordering might not be correct - ordering is used for content inheritance, and a few other things. There's a planned change, though, so that you will be able to manually set the order of versions.

Thanks Yaron for your quick answer. Any target date for the release of the change ?