Note
This outline needs fleshing out.
One of the most valuable contributions that non-core developers make is helping keep a project’s documentation up-to-date and useful.
Each Zope packages should have its own documentation, managed within the checkout of the project (see Contributing as a Non-Committer using Subversion and Contributing as a Non-Committer using Bazaar for notes on getting checkouts / branches as a non-committer).
This documentation is maintained as a set of files in the docs subdirectory of the project, containing source files in “restructured text” format (see the reStructuredText Refererence) as well as control files which convert those source texts into HTML, Latex, PDF, etc., using Sphinx (see the Sphinx manual).
The top-level document is conventionally docs/index.rst. This document should explain the purpose of the project, and will often link to other documents outlining usage, APIs, etc.
If you have Sphinx installed somewhere on your system, the docs/Makefile can be used to build various flavors of documentation. Assuming that the Sphinx scripts are installed in /opt/Sphinx/bin:
$ cd /tmp
$ svn co svn://svn.zope.org/repos/main/zope.event/trunk event-trunk
$ cd event-trunk/docs
$ PATH=/opt/Sphinx/bin:$PATH make html
After running that command, you can view the generated docs in your browser: file:///tmp/event-trunk/docs/.build/html/index.html
Re-running the make command after making changes to the docs lets you see the rendered HTML corresponding to your updates.
You can also use the Sphinx doctest extension to test example code snippets in the documentation:
$ PATH=/opt/Sphinx/bin:$PATH make doctest
Most Zope projects have support for building and running their tests using zc.buildout. Some of them also support building their docs using zc.buildotu:
$ cd /tmp
$ svn co svn://svn.zope.org/repos/main/zope.event/trunk event-trunk
$ cd event-trunk
$ /opt/Python-2.6.5/bin/python bootstrap.py
...
$ bin/buildout
...
$ bin/make-docs
If the make-docs script isn’t included yet, then adding it would be a really useful contribution. Add a section like the following to the project’s buildout.cfg:
[sphinx]
recipe = collective.recipe.sphinxbuilder
build = ${buildout:directory}/docs/_build
source = ${buildout:directory}/docs
outputs = doctest html
script-name = make-docs
extra-paths = ${buildout:directory}
If your project keeps its top-level package in the src subdiretory, the last line of that section would be:
extra-paths = ${buildout:directory}/src