Where's the documentation?

Crowdsourcing links to important features

Have you ever wondered what the options are, and where they are documented, when you look at the gazillion of configuration options in Liferay's Control Panel? Were you worried that a new team member would have a hard time exploring, or making sense of, all of the features that are readily available in Liferay (7.2 CE and DXP)?

Well, worry no more: Yours Truly published a new documentation plugin on marketplace, that will link to the matching documentation right where you need it - in the precise Control Panel screen that you're currently watching:

This is meant to provide pointers to reference documentation - not an alternative point for documentation itself.

The content linked is only prepopulated with some  documentation and quite a few boilerplate placeholders (hence the "crowdsourcing" in the subtitle of this article) and features prominent "edit on github" links to simple Markdown sources for authoring the documentation links. If you think that this is valuable, please help filling in the blanks and make use of the "edit on github" features.

The content can be updated independently of the plugin - it's embedded from an external non-tracking server.

Optionally, the plugin can also embed video or audio explanations for individual features, but so far I've not produced any sample content other than the proof-of-concept. See it all in action in this silent demo video:

If someone came up with some CSS suggestions to prettify the display, I won't object...

...and if you want to see how it's done: That can be arranged. It all started when I wondered how viable the recommendation to customize the UI through PortletFilters is. Turns out: For this kind of modification, PortletFilters are non-intrusive, the code is minimal and trivial, it just (TM) requires a lot of content... please help!

Blogs

I'm willing to pitch in on this for two reasons. 

 

1. What an awesome initiative -- the best UX is almost always "in context"

 

2. You used Clippy in your post :)

 

Great work Olaf, can't wait to see what this becomes.