documentation_style_guide.md

Yii Documentation Style Guide

Guidelines to go by when writing or editing any Yii documentation.

This needs to be expanded.

General Style

• Try to use an active voice.
• Use short, declarative sentences.
• Demonstrate ideas using code as much as possible.
• Never use "we". It's the Yii development team or the Yii core team. Better yet to put things in terms of the framework or the guide.
• Use the Oxford comma (e.g., "this, that, and the other" not "this, that and the other").
• Numeric lists should be complete sentences that end with periods (or other punctuation).
• Bullet lists should be fragments that don't end with periods.

Formatting

• Use italics for emphasis, never capitalization, bold, or underlines.

Blocks

Blocks use the Markdown > Type: . There are four block types:

• Warning, for bad security things and other problems
• Note, to emphasize key concepts, things to avoid
• Info, general information (an aside); not as strong as a "Note"
• Tip, pro tips, extras, can be useful but may not be needed by everyone all the time

The sentence after the colon should begin with a capital letter.

When translating documentation, these Block indicators should not be translated. Keeps them intact as they are and only translate the block content. For translating the Type word, each guide translation should have a blocktypes.json file containing the translations. The following shows an example for german:

{
    "Warning:": "Achtung:",
    "Note:": "Hinweis:",
    "Info:": "Info:",
    "Tip:": "Tipp:"
}

References

• Yii 2.0 or Yii 2 (not Yii2 or Yii2.0)
• Each "page" of the guide is referred to as a "section".

Capitalizations

• Web, not web
• the guide or this guide, not the Guide