Intended Audience

This documentation is useful for anyone involved in the development of content for Hornbill Docs and as a workflow reference for the Hornbill Docs team at Hornbill. The vast majority of our documentation is published on GitHub—we have adopted an open-source philosophy for our documentation, and welcome contributions to our documentation project from anyone interested in getting involved. This guide provides the information needed to contribute to the Hornbill Docs project.

Hornbill Docs Overview

The Hornbill Docs system is a complete end-to-end system for creating and publishing documentation to Hornbill Docs so that our product and customer success teams, customers, partners and any other interested parties can access, and contribute to, our published documentation.

Sharing your expertise with others on Hornbill Docs helps everyone in our community achieve more. Use the information in this guide to learn how to make updates to an existing published article, or publish new content to Hornbill Docs.

Almost all of the documents available on Hornbill Docs are published as open-source projects, hosted on GitHub. Documents that are published on GitHub can be forked by anyone wishing to contribute to Hornbill’s documentation, who can make changes/additions to the content and submit a pull request to the Hornbill Docs team for review and inclusion in future revisions of the published documentation.

This open-source approach improves communication and facilitates better knowledge sharing, helping our product and content teams, and giving customers access to the collective knowledge. Contribution to Hornbill’s documentation is moderated, ensuring content meets our quality and inclusion standards.

The documentation system is modeled around the notion of a Library of Documents. Each document is called a Book, and we call the collection of published Books the Library. There is one global library for all published Books that are presented on Hornbill’s Documentation Website.

You can think of the Hornbill Docs system as conceptually representative of a traditional book library, where a community (our customers, partners and team members) all have access to a public library (the document website), with all of the Books in that library being organized and categorized into different sections and locations within the library for accessibility.

Books can contain textual content, pictures, downloadable assets, embedded video or any other web based resources you would typically find in a web application, and Book content can be created in multiple languages where required.

Books can be created and authored by Hornbill’s Documentation Team. However, most Books are created and published as open source to facilitate contributions by our partners, customers and other interested parties. Open source nooks are available in source code format, published on GitHub, making it possible for anyone to fork the Book to their own GitHub account, make changes and submit a pull request to Hornbill’s Documentation Team for review and inclusion in the officially published documents.