[TYPO3-doc] Sphinx, There and Back Again

[Xavier Perseguers]

Hi,

> I'm sorry that this is so convoluted for now. We really aim to bring
> support for extensions with ReST-based manuals as soon as possible, but
> we are really only a few. It's great to see that you keep trying despite
> that.

Just had an idea which could be relatively "easy" to implement, as I've
demonstrated, json is a good way of embedding documentation. I think the
integration of documentation in the Backend /could/ be achieved by
generating JSON out of the reST doc. This could be done either by the
author himself or by the TER (former would be much quicker to implement
:D). The only "downside" with out-of-the-box inclusion of the generated
json files is that it will duplicate all images from the sources but
this is just a (I guess) relatively easy post-processor to implement to
change references back to the original images.

Then we could embed the documentation of each and every extension in
TYPO3 Backend, a bit like docs.typo3.org and this would work even if one
is offline or simply has no Internet access (which is the case for
Intranet projects).

This way we definitely move away from OOo (we don't ask TER to generate
swx on the fly, nor do we still ask developers to generate them), we
don't have the overhead of generating nice-looking PDF (which can be
automated but can really quickly become tricky to handle on a generic
way) and we can move the extension documentation away from the Extension
Manager as a separate extension for instance, just as language handling
is a separate extension now.

Cheers

-- 
Xavier Perseguers
Release Manager TYPO3 4.6

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