Joomla Help Site

This application is the code powering the help.joomla.org website. Its purpose is to render the help screens used in the Joomla! CMS and display a landing page for the now retired version of this site.

Requirements

• PHP 8.0+
• Composer
• Apache with mod_rewrite enabled and configured to allow the .htaccess file to be read
• If changing web assets, NPM is required

Installation

1. Clone this repo on your web server
2. Run the composer install command to install all dependencies
3. Copy etc/config.dist.json to etc/config.json and configure your environment

Modifying Web Assets

The web assets (CSS, JavaScript, and images) are compiled and processed with Laravel Mix which is a wrapper around webpack. The primary source for all assets is the assets directory, running Mix will place production assets into the www/media directory.

The use of Mix requires NPM as hinted at in the Installation section. NPM 6+ and Node 10+ are required. Three scripts are available:

• npm run prod will compile assets for production, which includes compression and minification; code must be committed to this repository with the production configuration
• npm run dev will compile the assets without production optimizations
• npm run watch is the same as the dev script but with the --watch flag passed

This site makes use of Subresource Integrity (SRI), therefore the integrity hashes must be regenerated after compiling assets. This can be done by running the bin/console template:generate-sri command.

Additional Configuration

The application optionally supports several additional configuration values which affect the application's behavior, to include:

• Caching - The symfony/cache package is used to provide a caching API to store data. The supported configuration values are under the cache key in the configuration and include:
  • enabled - Is the cache enabled?
  • lifetime - The lifetime (in seconds) of the cache data
  • adapter - The cache adapter to use; the currently supported values can be found in the CacheProvider
  • namespace - A unique namespace (or key prefix) for the application's cache, useful if using a shared cache source with other systems
• Debug - The system.debug configuration key can be set to true or false to enable the application's debug mode
• Error Reporting - The system.error_reporting configuration key can be set to a valid bitmask to be passed into the error_reporting() function
• Logging - The application's logging levels can be fine tuned by adjusting the log configuration keys:
  • log.level - The default logging level to use for all application loggers
  • log.application - The logging level to use specifically for the monolog.handler.application logger; defaults to the log.level value
• Template - The twig/twig package is used for the application's templates
  • template.debug - Flag to enable Twig's debug functionality, when enabled the caching functionality is not available
  • template.cache.enabled - Flag to enable Twig's caching functionality, defaults to false
  • template.cache.path - The path relative to the repo root where cached Twig files should be stored, defaults to cache/twig
• Wiki Integration - Some behaviors for the remote MediaWiki integration can be configured with the following configuration keys:
  • help.wiki - The base URL of the MediaWiki instance to interface with, defaults to https://docs.joomla.org
  • help.wiki_max_redirects - The number of wiki page redirects that will be followed, defaults to 5