How is the help for Play Framework implemented?

Question

I am a huge fan of the web-help used by the Play Framework. Here's why:

• Very easy to get docs for any version from the same place (all the way back to 1.0)
• All the docs have the same style (1.0 docs look just as good as 2.1.0 docs)
• Easy to read URLs (no iframe nonsense that many other web help systems seem to use)

I am currently using good old .chm for my application's documentation. I'm in the process of building a .chm to website converter so that I can put the docs up online.

Before I get too far, does anyone know how the Play Framework web help system is implemented? Is it possible to download the source somewhere?

Answer 1

The process is quite easy. Their documentation is near the source code in Git, so that they can benefit from Git (tag, merge/conflict).

It is written with Markdown so it is easy to write it with a simple text editor. Then it is converted to HTML files using the Pegdown library.

For an example of this process, you can take a look at this project: https://github.com/ndeverge/play2-docs-renderer

It converts on the fly the Markdown file from the Github repo to HTML files. You can see the result here: http://play2-docs-snapshot.herokuapp.com/

Answer 2

I think they uses markdown, here are the help sources

I don't know Play's documentation system details, anyway implementation something similar for my own app took about 2 hours with "editor" similar to this one used on the StackOverflow (javascript).

You can use for an example markdownj lib for Java and Pagedown as an editor.