Writing documentation

Directory Structure

The docs are built by calling make docs from your Oscar directory. The make docs command currently uses python3, so make sure it links to one of these versions.

They live in /docs/source. This directory structure is a simplified version of what Django does.

  • internals/ contains everything related to Oscar itself, e.g. contributing guidelines or design philosophies.

  • ref/ is the reference documentation, esp. consisting of

  • ref/apps/ which should be a guide to each Oscar core app, explaining it’s function, the main models, how it relates to the other apps, etc.

  • topics/ will contain “meta” articles, explaining how things tie together over several apps, or how Oscar can be combined with other solutions.

  • howto/ contains tutorial-style descriptions on how to solve a certain problem.

/index.rst is designed as the entry point, and diverges from above structure to make the documentation more approachable. Other index.rst files should only be created if there’s too many files to list them all. E.g. /index.rst directly links to all files in topics/ and internals/, but there’s an index.rst both for the files in howto/ and ref/apps/.

Style guides

Oscar currently does not have it’s own style guide for writing documentation. Please carefully review style guides for Python and Django. Please use gender-neutral language.