Architecture
The project is built around the core library that is called guides
. This library
contains all core components of the project. Like the different layers Parser,
Compiler and Renderer and includes the basic Nodes and templates to create
output.
Installation of the core library can be done using composer
:
composer require phpdocumentor/guidesThe other components are using the core library and extend it with additional
functionality. For example the guides-markdown
component adds support for
Markdown documents and the guides-restructuredtext
component adds support for
ReStructuredText documents.
All components are designed to be open for extension so you can bring your own parser, template engine or other component. The core library is designed to be the glue between all components.
The guides
, guides-markdown
and guides-restructuredtext
are seen as the main
libaries of the project. The other components are optional and can be used to extend the
functionality of the main libraries for specific use cases.
Application flow
Processing documents is done in a few steps.
- Parser The first step is to parse the document. This is done by the Parser component. The parser component will parse the document and create a tree of nodes. Each node represents a part of the document. For example a paragraph, a list or a table.
- The second step is to compile the tree of nodes.
- This is done by the Compiler component. During the compilation, modifications can be made to the tree of nodes. For example the compiler can add a table of contents to the tree of nodes.
- BaseTypeRenderer The third step is to render the tree of nodes. This is done by the Renderer component. The render component will render the tree of nodes to a specific output format. By default twig templates are used to render nodes to HTML. But you can create your own templates to render nodes to other formats. Or implement your own renderer to use a different template engine.