There was many changes over the last few months in KDE developer documentation tooling. The hope is to make KDE development easier to both newcomers but also long-time KDE contributors to use KDE technologies to build cool stuff.
Api documentation
The tooling for our generated documentation tooling improved. First of all, KApiDox got a new theme with a cleaner appearance and a better dark theme. But the improvement goes beyond just theming.
Doxyqml, our documentation bridge between QML and doxygen, got various improvements, thanks to Olaf Mandel and Lasse Lopperi. Now QML enums are supported and the lexer/parser got various bug fixes.
Speaking of QML documentation, the Kirigami API documentation was
improved and now uses more correctly @inherit tags and
@property tags. There is still room for improvements, but the
current state is already a lot better. Most Components are now
showing all their properties correctly and the type of the
property is correct. (kirigami!239)
Another improvement is that the generated Kirigami documentation
now shows more accurate names: e.g. Kirigami.Page instead of
org::kde::kirigami::Page. This makes it easier to read and
navigate the documentation.
There was also a bit of background work inside KApiDox, Jannet added support for QDoc, allowing to use QDoc as an alternative to Doxygen. This might be a better solution for generating documentation for projects with a lot of QML.
High level documentation
Since develop.kde.org was announced back in September 2020 just before Akademy, it received a steady stream of updates. In terms of visuals, Jannet replaced the left sidebar with a better-looking one.
A Doxygen integration was also added in the Hugo based website,
allowing to link to the API documentation in an easy way (e.g.
[Kirigami.Page](docs:kirigami2;Page)).
The Plasma documentation was massively improved. Zren moved his excellent tutorial about creating Plasma Widgets to /docs/plasma/widget. I also moved the Plasma Desktop Scripting tutorial and the Plasma Theme Tutorial from techbase to develop. This was a good occasion to update them to a more recent version of Plasma since some parts were from the early days of Plasma 5 and a few bits from KDE4 remained.
Concerning the Framework documentation, most of the tutorials from the Framework book, that was written a few years ago to develop. Same as the Plasma documentation, I used this opportunity to update the documentation and remove any mentions of deprecated APIS. I also did the same for most of the old tutorials from techbase.
Tobias Fella imported the old DBus tutorial from techbase and David Redondo wrote a tutorial about how to create sensor faces for the new Plasma Monitor.
Finally, Clau Cambra wrote a tutorial for getting started in Kirigami. The tutorial will guide you into creating a countdown counter using Kirigami and QML. This work is part of its Season of KDE project.
If you enjoy my work, you can sponsor me on Liberapay.
Comments
With an account on the Fediverse or Mastodon, you can respond to this post. Since Mastodon is decentralized, you can use your existing account hosted by another Mastodon server or compatible platform if you don't have an account on this one. Known non-private replies are displayed below.
Learn how this is implemented here.