documentation.rst

Writing CodeIgniter Documentation

CodeIgniter uses Sphinx to generate its documentation in a variety of formats, using reStructuredText to handle the formatting. If you are familiar with Markdown or Textile, you will quickly grasp reStructuredText. The focus is on readability and user friendliness. While they can be quite technical, we always write for humans!

A local table of contents should always be included, like the one below. It is created automatically by inserting the following:

.. contents::
        :local:

.. raw:: html

<div class="custom-index container"></div>

• Tools Required
• Page and Section Headings and Subheadings

The <div> that is inserted as raw HTML is a event for the documentation's JavaScript to dynamically add links to any function and method definitions contained in the current page.

Tools Required

To see the rendered HTML, ePub, PDF, etc., you will need to install Sphinx along with the PHP domain extension for Sphinx. The underlying requirement is to have Python installed.

You can read more about installing all tools in /user_guide_src/README.rst

Page and Section Headings and Subheadings

Headings not only provide order and sections within a page, but they also are used to automatically build both the page and document table of contents. Headings are formed by using certain characters as underlines for a bit of text. Major headings, like page titles and section headings also use overlines. Other headings just use underlines, with the following hierarchy:

# with overline for page titles
* with overline for major sections
= for subsections
- for subsubsections
^ for subsubsubsections
" for subsubsubsubsections (!)

The :download:`TextMate ELDocs Bundle <./ELDocs.tmbundle.zip>` can help you create these with the following tab triggers:

title->

        ##########
        Page Title
        ##########

sec->

        *************
        Major Section
        *************

sub->

        Subsection
        ==========

sss->

        SubSubSection
        -------------

ssss->

        SubSubSubSection
        ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

sssss->

        SubSubSubSubSection (!)
        """""""""""""""""""""""