Welcome to the Appcelerator Documentation Guides project.
The goal of this project is to provide open and transparent product documentation for the Appcelerator Titanium open source project.
The following are the main goals for this project:
- Open source and easy to fork - these guides should be open and transparent and available for anyone to obtain and modify
- Easy to author - these guides should be easy to author to encourage participation and accuracy
- Easy to build and run locally - these guides should be easy to build and read locally without the need for complex web server setup
- Easy to localize - these guides should be easy to localize into other languages given that size of the Appcelerator community globally
To build the guides, you'll need the following third-party components:
- Python 2.5+ - you'll need to obtain Python. If you're on OSX or Linux, Python is already installed.
- You'll need the following Python modules: json, mako and markdown
You can install the Python modules:
> easy_install Mako
> easy_install markdown
Once you have the required dependencies, simply run the gen.py script. This will generate the documentation into the output folder. To get the root webpage, open output/en/index.html in your favorite web browser.
Contribution should be rather easy. After generation the documentation page, navigate to the Contribute page in the navigation bar.
We often get asked "why not just make all the documentation wiki-style content?" That's a reasonable request and, in the past, we did. What we found was that the content was rarely updated and when it was, quality often suffered, or worse, it was incomplete. We have decided to make the guides easy to obtain, easy to author, easy to peer review and publish as opposed to providing a wiki-interface to them. Much like open source software, we find that once users take the time to checkout, build and contribute along with the peer review from checkins on GitHub, it ends up producing content which has much higher quality and contributions which have much greater completeness. We think this is a good balance at this point in the project's lifecycle.
(c) 2010 by Appcelerator, Inc. All Rights Reserved. The guides and associated scripts are licensed under the Apache Public License (version 2).
The documentation template was adapted from the Rail Guides which is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike. We relicense all those files under the same license.
Appcelerator is a registered trademark of Appcelerator, Inc. Appcelerator Titanium is a trademark of Appcelerator, Inc.