RT Documentation Now Online

In the past, the best source for RT documentation was the codebaseitself where you could use the trusty
perldoc command to find all of the embedded
documentation. You also had the RT Essentials
book for general
concepts and architecture.

These days, most of us are very used to tabbing into our browser’s
search box and asking the internet to magically find the answers to our
vaguely worded questions. Searches for RT questions typically find the
community wiki, mailing list
archives, and occasionally
a link to source code in Github.

Today this changes.

All of the documentation embedded in the RT source is now easily
accessible on the Best Practical
website, and web searches will
start to return results that link to official documentation. Each page
indicates which RT version it’s for, so you’ll know you’re not looking
at the documentation for the wrong RT version. We’ll be updating the
site with documentation for each currently supported major version of RT
going forward.

What’s There

The documentation is in a few major categories:

• Install and Upgrade: for getting started or moving to a new version

• User: aimed at explaining features and how to do things

• Utilities: docs for all of the utilities delivered with RT, from the rt
  command-line interface tool to rt-crontool to rt-server

• Developer: core documentation on all of the Perl modules that make up RT

• Actions and Conditions: core RT actions and conditions available for Scrips
  and rt-crontool

More to Come

Even though this documentation has been public and available for years,
publishing it to the web site gives it a new level of visibility. This shows
where our docs need some work (yes, we see it too). We’ll continue to improve,
correct, and add to the documentation over time.

You can help by submitting documentation patches if you find areas that
could be improved or are incorrect. Part of the published doc includes
instructions for getting started contributing
patches. You can also
browse the code and doc on Github
and use their web editing feature to make changes and submit pull
requests easily.

We hope you find the docs useful. Let us know what you think.