How To... Document a Project

This document is intended to get you started on documenting your own project using Centipede. You should have worked through How To... Start a Project before you work through this How To. Please note this document does not attempt to teach you what each component in the Centipede Build System does, rather it is aimed at getting you up and running quickly. When you want to do some clever customisation stuff you will need to delve into the more in depth manuals (when they get written) and the mailing lists.

Centipede generates a considerable amount of documentation for your project from the source code and tests that you provide. It will also manage the project web site for you, ensuring that everything is up to date whenever you do a build.

All documentation is stored as XML files and is transformed into the final documentation by the Forrest cent (which in turn uses Cocoon). Because documentation is stored in XML format we can transform it into many different formats for publication.

This How To is only intended to show you how to use centipede to control the generation of project documentation, it does not deal with more complex topics such as Forrest configuration. For this you need to learn about Forrest itself..

In this tutorial we assume that you have started a project using Centipede. If you have still to do this then we suggest you work through How To... Start a Project first.

This tutorial is written against Version 1.0b2 of Centipede, later versions may differ. If you find an inconsistency please let me know, or better still go ahead and improve on this document, send any changes to us and we will include them in the next version