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.

One sentence per change, with the details a click away

Every change starts with one line in plain language: what is different, and nothing else. No file names, no commands, no internal ticket numbers. That is deliberate — you should be able to see at a glance whether a release changes anything for you.

If you run a server yourself, such a line often carries Details for administrators underneath it. Click it and the block unfolds with the technical half of the same change: the command that goes with it, the address that moved, or what to do before you upgrade. Leave it folded and you see none of it. That way there is one list of changes for everybody, instead of two lists that drift apart.

The blocks open with a mouse and with the keyboard (tab to the label, then Enter), and they stay open while you are on the page. The search box above the list searches the folded text as well.

How often a version appears

Every finished piece of work gets a number of its own, and a run of those becomes a larger version together. In practice: the last number (0.16.1 → 0.16.2) changes often and covers one piece of work, the middle number (0.16.0 → 0.17.0) changes when a whole round is finished. A version with ~dev in it is a panel caught in the middle of a change — on a production panel that should not happen.

The version you are running is always at the foot of the sidebar, and the same version is marked This is what is running in the version list. That is the number to quote when you ask a question about anything.

Something missing?

Missing explanation in the documentation is a bug, not an omission. Report it to your hosting provider — they can add an article, because the manual and the release notes are built from the same source as the panel itself. If you run the panel yourself, the working method (where the articles live, how to run the generators and how a version is cut) is in the developer documentation: docs/development.md.

See also

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