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Help Needed with Documentation
#1

(This post was last modified: 06-06-2021, 08:27 PM by kilishan.)

As you all know there is a pretty small group of core contributors to the project. This is a true open-source project, with no corporate backing, just volunteers who love the project. With the size of the team it's difficult to keep up with everything that we'd like to do so some areas don't get as much love as they deserve. One of those areas is the documentation.

Do you love CodeIgniter also, but not sure you know it well enough to contribute to the code? Then I'd love to get your help improving the documentation, and making sure it's all accurate and complete.

Some things that I think could use some work:

- more examples throughout
- look into reorganizing for simpler navigation
- ensure consistency in how things are presented.
- better upgrade guides

Would you be interested? If so let me know here. We'll keep a channel open on the Slack channel just for documentation once we get some interest and we can discuss details there a bit more.

If you have ideas for improvement feel free to mention it here also.

Hope to work with some of you soon!

EDIT: Just to be sure that I was clear, I was referring to the User Guide. For reference, here's some of the current info we have around writing CI documentation.
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#2

Well, I'm one of those who think our User Guide is not beginner-friendly. And as a teacher, I can help shaping the general form of it. If you need this kind of help, you can count me in. 

You asked for ideas: I can suggest ordering/seperating the subjects in MVC order, or in another logical way, on the left menu on our User Guide page, and then list the rest such as Libraries, Helpers etc. Plus, I feel like Some examples also need to be organized again.
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#3

(This post was last modified: 06-05-2021, 02:01 PM by captain-sensible.)

well i have half a clue with web developement and am full stack recently setting up apache on Arch Linux , with bootstrap sass and grunt task runner to convert and concatanate bootstrap sass into css, with a custom css that over rides bootstrap where applicable.

I have written my own cms ; which i am reviewing , though reading through your book , its rough and ready lacking finess and ignoring fancy testing approaches. It does work though and has basic securiity in place. No i'm not bothered uploading to github anymore, since for one the presence of all the node_modules that bootstrap needs puts it well over the upload limit. If you pm, or via email me i am willing to give you the login page (which is hidden) and you can poke around the system i've written -that way yo uwill knowthe level i'm at - its not that great to be honest .

probably though my greatest asset if i'm being honest is that i have always had to put a lot of time and effort into getting things to work googling and sometimes applying an Amoeba approach( thats when you bang your head on a wall and are too dumb to know what to do , so you try every permutation until l it works !) . Thus if i can undestand the docs then anyone can . If i can't undestand the docs or you have omitted something ,assuming the reader would know that , then you are not pitching the level at beginners , who are probably the biggest potential for uptake for CI.

ps my go to web browser on vanilla Arch is waterfox not forefox, but unlike firefox i can't find any box to tick for spelling ,thus there is probably plenty of erros above. i do know however how to use aspell from a linux command line to spell check php and html pages.
Arch Book  CodeIgniter4 on Apache(pages 92-114) 
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#4

Hi.
I can and want to help with the documentation as much as possible.
I have come across some grammatical misconstructions and lexical errors and I have been keeping track of everyone I have seen. I forked the repo some weeks ago with the hopes of contributing.
This is sounds and looks good to me. I'm in!
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#5

Great to see some interested parties! Please let me know your usernames on Slack, if different than here and we'll get a documentation channel setup. If you're not on Slack yet, please sign up (I fixed the link, yay!)
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#6

I have been using Codeigniter 3. I would be happy to contribute, however, I would need initial guidance on the expectations
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#7

Kilishan,

As a long time user of CI, I would implore you to focus on the database section.
- there is the "straight" way to for queries (i.e. $db->query() )
- there is the "builder" way to for queries (i.e. $builder->get() )
- there is the "model" way to for queries (i.e. $userModel->findAll()Wink

Each with a slightly different, yet seemingly overlapping way to do things.
It is maddening at times...

Then there are entities. Which just add to the confusion on how all of this is supposed to work together.

And clear examples from a basic provided table schema with examples that apply to it would be divine. Also, complete examples, a single line without context when trying to sort something out is frustrating (like where does $db or $builder come from...). And then how to access the results in the same example would make the process complete.

Been working in CI4 on production systems now for the past 3 months and I'm still like WTF do I need to do to get and inspect the query results.
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#8

@Kaosweaver good suggestions. And I agree that can be confusing. One thing I'd love to add is more concrete examples throughout all of the docs. Would love your help if you're interested!

In the meantime, I did a blog post on this a few weeks ago that will (hopefully) help clear things up. At least a little. Smile
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#9

I saw this thread asking for help with documentation, when I was looking for the documentation status.

My question was: is the online documentation up to date, or out of date? As a complete newbie I notice the documentation says "A fresh install has six directories: /app, /system, /public, /writable, /tests and possibly /docs." But my fresh installation (via Scriptaculous) is different. It has these top-level directories: /app, /public, /tests, /vendor, /writable This makes me think the documenation is not up to date, which is of some concern as I will have to rely on docs (and forum).

Also, the "First Application" tutorial Pages.php has this:


Code:
namespace App\Controllers;
use CodeIgniter\Controller;
class Pages extends Controller


which differs from the fresh installation Home.php which has this:


Code:
namespace App\Controllers;
class Home extends BaseController


Should I be concerned by these differences? Are they deliberate or do they represent out of date documentation?
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#10

I would love to help out with the documentation as well. I have been using Codeigniter for over a very long time.. and would like to contribute back to the project. If I can help out with documentation.. it would be awesome.
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