Finding help and seeing what changed

This documentation lives inside the panel: you never leave for another website, and it works offline on your phone. The same texts are also on a public site, so you can send a link to somebody who does not have an account (yet). This page explains where help is, how to search it, and where to see what changed in the panel.

Where help is

On every page, always in the same place:

• Help with this page — the icon at the top right, or simply the ? key. A panel slides in with exactly the article about the screen you are on. At the bottom of it is Open the full documentation, if you would rather keep reading with the navigation beside you.
• Documentation — at the foot of the sidebar and at the top right. That is the overview of every topic.
• ⌘K (or Ctrl+K) opens the command palette. It searches the navigation and the documentation at once: type "mailbox" and you get both the page and the article.

What an article looks like

An article has three columns, and each of the three does something:

• left, the topics. The group you are in is open and the article you are reading is marked, so you always see where you are.
• middle, the text, at a fixed reading width. That is deliberately not the full width of the screen: a 150-character line is exactly why long documentation reads like work.
• right, On this page, with the article's own headings. As you scroll, the heading you are under lights up. On a narrow screen this column disappears and the left one becomes a menu you open.

Above the text is the trail (Documentation › topic › article), and at the foot of it are Previous and Next, so a topic can be read straight through.

Code blocks carry a copy button; blocks that are a transcript (the command with its output underneath) do not, because nobody copies those.

Searching

The search box above the documentation searches every article: titles, headings and the text itself. Several words mean "all of them present", so wordpress staging finds the page that is about both rather than every page that mentions WordPress. When nothing matches it says so — you do not get the whole list back as though you had typed nothing.

The search runs in your browser. Nothing goes to a search service and there is nothing to fetch first: the documentation is part of the panel.

You see the articles written for you

The documentation filters itself by the kind of account you have:

• a hosting customer sees the customer articles;
• a reseller sees those and their customers' — because they answer their questions;
• an administrator sees everything.

Above the documentation is a control to change that: Show everything, or View as customer to see what your customers see. Useful with somebody on the phone.

Open an article written for a higher level and you do not get "page does not exist" — you get the article with a block above it saying who it was written for and what you can do. That is more honest than pretending the explanation is not there.

Dutch and English

Every article exists in both languages. Switch language and you stay on the same article rather than being dropped back at the index. Your language is in Settings.

The public documentation site

The same articles are public at docs.corecp.dev, with no sign-in. That is the link to send a customer, or somebody who has no account yet. The public site carries the brand of whichever hostname you used: if your hosting provider has its own name and colour, they are there too.

# Every article has a fixed, shareable link, per language:
curl -sI https://docs.corecp.dev/en/setting-up-email | head -1
curl -sI https://docs.corecp.dev/nl/e-mail-instellen | head -1

What changed

Under What changed (or through the version at the foot of the sidebar) are the release notes. On the left is the list of versions, newest first, with Not released yet at the top — that is work already in the panel but not cut under a version number.

Choose a version and its contents are on the right:

• first everything that requires action — the things to know before you upgrade, with a red label;
• then the changes grouped by kind: Added, Changed, Fixed, Removed, Deprecated and Security;
• with a filter by kind and a search box, for when a release is large.

Every version has an address of its own, so you can link straight to it: /changelog/0.15.0. The version list also shows which one you are running.

For administrators: where this comes from

The articles are markdown files in the repository, Dutch and English side by side, with a header saying who they are for and which screen they belong to:

ls docs/user/nl docs/user/en
head -9 docs/user/en/adding-a-server.md

---
id: adding-a-server
title: Adding a server
audience: admin
section: platform
locale: en
routeKey: /nodes/add
order: 10
---

routeKey is what "Help with this page" uses: the screen /nodes/add opens this article. One source feeds all three surfaces — the manual, the panel beside a screen, and the public site.

The panel does not read those files while it runs: they are baked into the build. So after editing an article or a changelog line, run the generators and commit what they emit:

cd corecp-panel/web
npm run gen:docs        # docs/user/**.md  → src/lib/docs*.gen.ts and the public site
npm run gen:changelog   # docs/changelog/  → src/lib/changelog.gen.ts

Forget that and the build goes red: scripts/ci.sh checks that the generated files still match the documents, and that a change to the code arrives with a changelog entry and a documentation update for its own area.

The panel's version lives in one place and grows with the changelog:

bash scripts/panel-version.sh show   # 0.16.0~dev4
bash scripts/panel-version.sh dev    # start the next one
bash scripts/panel-version.sh cut    # cut it, changelog section and all

The full rules are in docs/development.md and docs/panel.md.

Something missing?

Missing explanation in the documentation is a bug, not an omission. Report it to your hosting provider; if that is you, the shortest way is to add an article in docs/user/nl/ and docs/user/en/ and run the generator.

See also

• Signing in, switching and finding your way
• Installing it on your phone