Documentation to ship with a bundle
This page is for bundlers who decide what documentation goes into a bundle and what they write themselves. The help you are reading is free documentation, so you may ship it, adapt it and build your own manual on it.
Contents
- What Exponential already ships
- What the GFDL lets you do
- What the GFDL asks
- What you should write yourself
- Pages to point recipients to
What Exponential already ships
| Part | Where | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| The documentation tree | doc/ (English in doc/eng-us/) | installation guide, features, upgrade notes, examples, this help |
| The built-in help | the help dashboard in the administration | reads the pages of doc/; "Only git-tracked files below doc/ ... are pages" for the command-line tool, and an installation without .git uses the manifest share/filelist.md5 as its list |
| The license | doc/eng-us/LICENSE-GFDL-1.3.txt | GNU Free Documentation License 1.3 |
| Copyright and exceptions | doc/eng-us/README-LICENSE.md | who holds the copyright, older pages with other terms |
The help's file list comes from the Git index, git ls-files, or share/filelist.md5 "for an installation without
.git" (kernel/classes/help/exphelpallowlist.php). A bundle built without .git therefore needs an up-to-date
manifest for the built-in help to list its pages (Integrity checks).
What the GFDL lets you do
From Free documentation, in short:
- read, copy and share the pages, "for free or for a fee, in any medium";
- translate them;
- adapt them into your own manual, course material or customer guide.
What the GFDL asks
When you pass copies on, keep with every copy:
- the copyright notices of the pages;
- the license notice;
- a copy of the license (
doc/eng-us/LICENSE-GFDL-1.3.txt).
"Do not add conditions of your own, and do not use technical measures ... that stop the people you give copies to from reading or copying them further." More than 100 copies in a hard-to-edit format need an editable copy as well; an adapted version is released under the GFDL again. The details are in the license and on Free documentation. Not legal advice.
What you should write yourself
The project documents Exponential; only you can document your bundle:
| Document | Contents |
|---|---|
| Getting started | how to start the bundle, where the site and the administration are, how the first password reaches the recipient |
| What is inside | the versions, the extensions, the site package, the runtime; your third-party list |
| Configuration | where the settings of your bundle live, which ones the recipient may change |
| Updates | how the recipient updates, and how you announce updates (Updates and upgrade paths) |
| Support | what you support and where to ask (Support boundaries) |
| Licenses | your notice file and the source offer (License texts and notices) |
Building on this help for those documents is welcome; keep the notices.
Pages to point recipients to
| Need | Page |
|---|---|
| Sign in and change the password | The default administrator password, Change the administrator password |
| Harden the installation | Security hardening, Chapter 13 |
| Back up and restore | Chapter 10.9 Backups and restore |
| Update | Update with Git, Chapter 11: Upgrading |
| Databases | Database support |
| When something goes wrong | When something goes wrong |
Related pages
- The license of this documentation
- Contributing docs and translations
- License texts and notices to ship
- Free documentation: this page is free to copy, translate and improve under the GNU FDL 1.3.
Become an Exponential Partner
Partners share their information, provide funding, contribute back and develop the products with us, and that is how Exponential grows. A partner website and dashboard are planned for mid-2027: please become a partner today to speed up our growth rate and land new features faster.