The rework of the official mailcow docs
The new 2.0 version of the mailcow documentation has been redesigned from scratch based on the original.
Advantages compared to the 1.0 version:
- Full translation support (English and German are officially supported by Servercow/tinc).
- New folder structure for better overview/ordering of sub-pages.
Due to the fact that this version now has some serious changes compared to the 1.0 version, all pending merge requests are no longer compatible with this version.
The documentation lives (just like the actual mailcow project) from community contributions.
Of course, we will also make our contributions to the documentation, but especially the new translation support naturally brings some scope for multiple community supported languages.
To contribute new pages/translations simply clone the repository and then work with your cloned repository. Once you are done with your work start a pull request, if approved this will then be implemented into the actual documentation.
So you want to provide a new translation for the documentation? Great, thanks for that <3
There are a few things to keep in mind, which are essential for a smooth process:
As a start for possible translations, the language must first be added to the language selection. To add it, edit the mkdocs.yml file and add the language in the "translations" section (under the already existing languages):
[...]
- i18n: # <--- Translation plugin
default_language: en
languages:
en: English
de: Deutsch
[...] <--- Add the languages here.
[...]
The new language will now appear in the language selector once the mkdocs are rebuilt (see Testing).
The i18n plugin for mkdocs (see here is used for our documentation, so the standard notations of the plugin apply (see here) i.e. each language of a page will be a separate .md file which is composed of the filename.languagecode.md.
The filenames must remain the same for the other languages, only the country code in front of the .md extension is set to the desired language.
If a page does NOT exist in a language, the English version of the page will be used by default, because English is set as default_language in mkdocs.yml.
Images can also be "translated"! These are distinguished (similar to the pages) by the country codes.
The menu is NOT translated by default and must be translated by hand, this is also done in the mkdocs.yml:
[...]
- i18n: # <--- Translation plugin
default_language: en
languages:
en: English
de: Deutsch
nav_translations:
#### Begin of german translation
de: #<--- Language code here
'Information & Support': 'Informationen & Support'
### Prerequisites Section
'Prerequisites': 'Voraussetzungen'
'Prepare your system': 'Systemvoraussetzungen'
'DNS setup': 'DNS Einstellungen'
[...]
The preceding English variant MUST be kept, otherwise the translation will not work.
docs <-- Root Folder
├── assets
│ └── images <-- Folder where the images are located (sorted by main chapter)
│ ├─ topic1
| │ ├── image.en.png
| │ ├── image.de.png
| │ ├── image.XX.png
| ├─ topic2
| │ ├── image.en.png
| │ ├── image.de.png
| │ ├── image.XX.png
| ├─ topicX
| ├── image.en.png
| ├── image.de.png
| ├── image.XX.png
|
├── topic1 <-- Folder where the documentation sites are located (sorted by main chapter)
│ ├── file.en.md
| ├── file.de.md
│ ├── file.XX.md
|
├── topic2
│ ├── subtopic1 <-- Some Chapters are divided into multiple subtopics
| | ├── file.en.md
| | ├── file.de.md
| | ├── file.XX.md
│ ├── subtopicX
| ├── file.en.md
| ├── file.de.md
| ├── file.XX.md
|
├── topicX
│ ├── file.en.md
| ├── file.de.md
│ ├── file.XX.md
To build and test it locally, you need the Material theme for MkDocs, MkDocs itself and Pygments. To install these with pip and get it up and running, fire up your terminal and enter
git clone https://github.com/mailcow/mailcow-dockerized-docs.git
pip install -r requirements.txt
mkdocs serve