The base text for the online Lamplight help system. This text is then built on demand for individual customers, so that it is customised to their system:

• their language pack is used, so terms used in the text reflect their system
• modules that are not in use are greyed out

To add content to the help manual, you will need to

1. clone this repo (once), or make sure your copy is up to date (frequently, pull)
2. make your changes
3. submit a pull request to the review branch
4. once changes have been reviewed, they'll be merged into the master

A separate build process will then take the text from here and update customer help files and downloads.

Please make frequent commits - one commit should only have changes to one page (file). Reference issues in the commit message (e.g. "Updated page on adding work records #123").

The current set of terms that may be used and which should be translated are listed. If additional ones are needed, you'll need to speak to Matt.

Terms to be translated will respect the case, so {{Eval}} will be replaced by Evaluation, and {{eval}} as evaluation. Plurals should be outside the {{placeholder}}s (which is admittedly tricky for things like {{staff}}s).

Text of help pages is written in markdown (see the syntax guide) and then converted to html.

Pages files are currently named chapter-section-subsection_Page_title.markdown. It won't matter what they're called, but that seems a reasonable convention to follow.

Help pages should use the following format

# 12.3.4    Page title.

> An short paragraph giving a summary of the main content of the page.  Be sure to 
remember the initial '>'.

The main text of the help page.  This will need to include terms that
can be translated, like {{Lamplight}}.

Just keep writing...  Links to other pages should be inserted as links in the normal
way [12.3.4  Title of the page linked to](/help/index/v/{{version}}/p/12/3/4),
but including the {{version}} placeholder (for now - see below).

Images are inserted like this:
![Text describing the image, including {{Lamplight}} placeholders]({{imgpath}}123a.png)
i.e. as markdown images, but include an {{imgpath}} placeholder (for now, anyway).

At the end, please put a tag that describes which module the page relates to.

###### core|eval|comms|charge|costs|datadirect|library|publish|staff|waiting module

Images (screenshots) should be added to the img/ directory. The number of an image no longer relates to anything (you can call them anything), but the letter (e.g. 123a.png) was incremented within a single page of the manual - so 123a.png, 123b.png and 123c.png would all be expected to be on the same page.

There are currently two versions of the base text for the help manual - v0 and v1. There could be more, and different customers can use different versions as their base before it's translated. Currently, v0 is used for all customers except for VIP Online, which uses v1. In principle, though, it'd be possible to add your own version number and build from there.

But in short, edit the v0 files. Also, edit the markdown, not the html which is there at the moment - that was included for reference following the initial setup of this github approach to things, but will be removed in due course.

The other kind of version is that version that's actually deployed, and is the number in the /v/123/ part of the help manual urls and the {{version}} placeholders that need to be in the urls.

This kind of version should disappear, but we'll need to keep it in links for now.

The other linkey placeholder is the {{imgpath}}, which can also vary for different customers to enable use of different image sets.

Lamplight Database help manual text by Lamplight Database Systems Limited is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.