Skip to content

Contributing to the Orchard Core documentation

First of all, thank you for thinking about contributing to the docs! This is especially valuable while you're still new to Orchard because your experiences and revelations can help other newcomers a lot.

The Orchard Core documentation site is built with MkDocs and served from Read the docs.

Editing documentation pages

On every documentation page, including this one, you'll see an editor icon in the top right corner. If you click that you'll be able to do quick edits right within GitHub.

Alternatively, you can clone the whole Orchard Core repository and edit any documentation file there. These you can find under the src/docs folder. If you open the Orchard Core solution (OrchardCore.sln in the root) in Visual Studio or another IDE then you'll be able to browse the files in the OrchardCore.Docs project under the docs solution folder. If you use a Markdown editor like the Markdown Editor VS extension then you'll see all the Markdown formatting and embedded images in a WYSIWYG manner, and links will work too.

To embed YouTube videos, be sure to tick "Enable privacy-enhanced mode." when generating the embed code (this will create a code that references youtube-nocookie.com).

Adding docs for a new extension or topic

Do the following if you're adding docs for a newly developed extension, or if you add some other completely new topic (in which case adapt it to the section you add the topic to):

  1. Add a folder under reference/modules with the same name as the module's project without OrchardCore.. E.g. for OrchardCore.AuditTrail use AuditTrail.
  2. Add a README.md file to it, following the format of existing such files. There, add an overview of the extension's features, configuration, embed demo videos.
  3. Link to the README.md file from reference/modules/README.md.
  4. Link to the README.md file from the mkdocs.yml file in the repository root.
  5. If the module contains content parts, also link the README.md file from reference/modules/ContentParts/README.md.

Running the documentation site locally

With MkDocs you can get the full docs.orchardcore.net experience locally too. If you are looking to contribute substantial amount of docs then please do run the site locally to make sure what you write will actually look like it should.

  1. Follow the MkDocs installation guide to install Python. once you have Python installed you won't need to install MkDocs by hand, we'll do that in a next step. If you're on Windows be sure to add the Python Scripts folder to the PATH as noted there, otherwise none of the mkdocs commands will be found. You may need to add your user's Scripts folder (something like C:\Users\<user name>\AppData\Roaming\Python\Python39\Scripts) to the PATH too.
  2. Open a command line in the root of your clone of the repository.
  3. Run pip3 install -r src/docs/requirements.txt to install dependencies.
  4. Run mkdocs serve to start the site. You'll then be able to browse it under http://127.0.0.1:8000.