Django Documentation Refactor has landed

This post was written on 2008/08/24 at 09:56:37 by Horst Gutmann

A long time coming the documentation refactoring has finally landed on docs.djangoproject.com and in trunk. Compared to the previous format this one now uses Georg Brandl's Sphinx documentation system, which also finally gives you as a user a simple way to have the documentation bundled with Django itself to be converted to HTML with one command (if everything works) :-). To do this, simply go to the docs folder of your Django checkout and run make html (naturally after installing Sphinx) and if everything works you should end up with a whole bunch of HTML files. Great work Jacob et al. :-)

So far for me this isn't working yet, probably because I'm living on the bleeding edge with Sphinx for a couple of reasons, but perhaps I can find some time to dig into this. If you get a syntax error line layout.html line 10 when building the documentation, make sure that you've installed Jinja 1.2 (instead of something older like 1.1).

The structure is new too and it will definitely take some time getting used too, but the separation between primary content (the one on the left side of the index page) and additional articles (in the boxes on the right side) definitely makes sense :-) For now it isn't linked yet in the main menu on the site, probably because it's still in testing stage.

Comments:

  • DyadyaZed (Guest)

    Is it possible to make html files under Windows? It would be great idea to put compiled version on the Django project website to download.

    Aug. 24, 2008, 1:34 p.m.

  • zerok

    Since I don't have any Windows machines around I can't try this, but according the the Sphinx docs you can also build the documentation using sphinx-build :-)

    Aug. 24, 2008, 1:37 p.m.

  • Ian (Guest)

    Yes, on windows you use sphinx through its build script. So:

    cd path-to-djangodocs c:path-to-sphinxsphinx-build.py -b htmlhelp . _buildhtmlhelp

    Works for me.

    Obviously substitute htmlhelp for just html or latex, or whatever format you want.

    Aug. 25, 2008, 1:56 p.m.

  • Ian (Guest)

    Eugh, sorry about the markdown clash:

    cd \path-to-django\docs

    c:\path-to-sphinx\sphinx-build.py -b htmlhelp . _build\htmlhelp

    Should be better (that'll teach me to preview!)

    Aug. 25, 2008, 1:58 p.m.

*'d input fields are required.