Documentation
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INDEX

Documentation Library

Search for information on Hornbill Documentation.

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Have questions about this site?

What is this site?

  • This website is Hornbill's new product documentation website and is currently under development.
  • It is intended that all existing and future public-facing documentation we produce will be available to search, browse and share.
  • Hornbill's current documentation is available at Hornbill Wiki but over time this content will be migrated to this documentation site.
  • Please feel free to have a look around at any time.

Why has Hornbill created this site?

  • Hornbill's products have moved on considerably since we introduced it almost 10 years ago. At the time, the MediaWiki tool was sufficient, but we have outgrown it.
  • Our customers are more enterprise focused and more self-sufficient than ever before, so for 2023 and beyond we have established a new documentation platform and team to drive our documentation initiative forwards.
  • We are aiming to deprecate the use of Hornbill Wiki for most Hornbill related documentation.
  • We want to enable our growing partner network with product resources and information, documentation beyond our Wiki approach is required.
  • We could definitely do with some help, and may even pay for some! If you have domain knowledge and would like to help, please check out our Hornbill Docs Contributor Guide and contact the Hornbill docs team at docs@hornbill.com.

What will this site be good for?

  • Community contribution will be facilitated, encouraged, and most welcome.
  • High quality documentation, will be kept up to date as rapidly as our products evolve.
  • Real-time content search and discovery.
  • Articles organized into books, books into libraries, creating a more natural and logical structure to our documentation.
  • Legacy API documentation and various other documentation sources will all be consolidated into a single unified documentation system.
  • Documentation available in browser as well as printable/viewable as PDF on demand.
  • Personalized documentation experience, allowing dark/light mode, article subscriptions, social media sharing and other useful features.
  • Almost all publicly available documentation on docs.hornbill.com will be open-source and available to fork on GitHub, allowing customers to derive their own custom documentation around Hornbill products should they wish to.

What is the timeline for this site?

  • We have taken the decision to publish and make available early, there is very little content at this time.
  • As and when we have completed/usable documentation, it will be published here.
  • We have a host of additional features we wish to add over time, so please watch this space.
  • We expect most of our existing documentation should be reviewed/migrated to docs.hornbill.com over the coming months.
  • The documentation project will be ongoing, will continue to expand, evolve and improve day-by-day.

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Partner Content Creator/Editor Workflow

Sometimes Hornbill will partner with and outsource to professional writers who are working on substantial portions of, or even creating whole documents that will be published on the Hornbill Docs site. Like our internal documentation team, and in these cases, we can provide direct access to individual documents’ GitHub repositories allowing the author to work directly on the master repo, removing the need for the Hornbill Docs team and the author to work with Pull Requests and review/merge cycles which is typical in the Complex Edits workflow. In effect, this is the exact same workflow as we use internally for authoring documents, which we extend to trusted content partners and individuals who are otherwise outside of Hornbill.

How it Works

Once we have agreed to work with you on a specific document where there is substantial writing required, we will:

  • Advise you we are using this workflow
  • Ask you for your GitHub account name in order that we may add you to the specific master repository that contains the document source. Although there may be exceptions to this, generally speaking you will only have access to the master repository during the development phase, which means your edits will not be published directly to the Hornbill Docs website. Instead we will have a specific preview site which you will be able to see published versions of the document(s) you have made changes to.
  • Share a link to the master repository in order that you may clone it directly to your local computer, without having to clone to your personal account (and therefore negating the need to use the Complex Edits workflow with Pull requests), and be able to commit back to the master repository as required.

Before you begin

The following steps must be complete before you can edit and commit Hornbill documentation:

  1. Let us know the account name for your GitHub account, or register for a free GitHub account if you do not already have one.
  2. Download and install GitHub Desktop if you do not already have this installed.
  3. Log into your GitHub account within GitHub Desktop.
  4. Download and install Visual Studio Code, or use any other text editor you are comfortable/familiar with.
  5. Download and install Node.js LTS (Minimum version: Node.js LTS v18 LTS).

Important

Install the latest Long Term Support (LTS) version of Node.js. Non-LTS versions are not validated by Hornbill.

Note

During the Node.js installation, you may be asked to automatically install the tools necessary to compile native modules. Because these tools are required by the Hornbill’s HDocBook tooling, you must either:

  1. Allow the Node.js installation to download and install these automatically.
  2. Install the tooling manually once the Node.js installation is complete. To do this, see the node-gyp package documentation for further information.
  1. Install HDocBook Tools. To install HDocBook Tools, open a terminal window and enter the following command:
    npm install hdoc-tools -g

Depending on your local operating system permissions, you may need to run the command as the root user. This installs the package globally to your Node.js installation, making the hdoc CLI tool available for you to use. If installing node modules globally does not work for you, use local administrator rights.

Cloning Document Repository

Open GitHub Desktop and add a repository using the ‘’‘Clone Repository…’‘’ option. Once cloned, open the project in VS Code and edit as required. You can use all of the usual Git features to manage and commit your changes, and use GitHub Desktop to push change sets back into the master repository as required.

Note

Please remember to always validate your documentation before committing changes. In VS Code, open a terminal and simply type `hdoc validate’ and your document will be checked for spelling, link integrity, missing pages, missing images and so on.

Failing to validate your document will prevent any publishing because our publishing tools will run these validations first.

Start Editing

Once you have cloned a repository, in GitHub Desktop there should be an Open In Visual Studio Code button, simply press that button, Visual Studio Code will open at the correct location.

Edit and commit changes using VS Code GitHub integration.

When you wish to commit your changes to the master repository, go to GitHub Desktop and press the “Push Origin” button and your changes will be pushed to the repository master

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