phpDocumentor has an advanced templating system that, due to its flexibility, requires a bit of background. Themes in most other applications require you to follow a strict series of required files and folders in order to work. Templating in phpDocumentor allows you to be completely free in choosing how you organize your template.
This enables you to generate not just HTML documentation but also XML output. PDFs, markdown files and more. What is perhaps even better is that users of templates can combine multiple templates during a single documentation run to produce multiple types of output simultaneously.
What happens is that phpDocumentor reads a special configuration file, called template.xml, that contains some background information on the template (such as author) and a series of action definitions that will determine what the template exactly does.
These action definitions are called transformations.
Each transformation is responsible for a single specific task execution and provides parameters and options to delegate the execution of that task to a Writer.
For example:
In order to have a fully functional website showing the API Documentation there is a CSS file included with the template. This CSS file needs to be copied to the destination location. As such there is a specific transformation in the template definition that describes: the Writer responsible for File Operations should move that file to a folder named ‘css’ in the target location.
In addition to the example above there are writers that are capable of generating a Checkstyle report of errors, one or more HTML files using a single twig template and more. Please see Writers for a complete list of writers and their actions.
Almost each writer needs to know the following:
phpDocumentor will go through each of the transformations in the order where they are defined in the template.xml and may set state that can be remembered between each of the transformations.
Templates can be located in the data/templates folder of phpDocumentor, or a custom location of your chosing. All templates have in common that they are governed by a special configuration file called template.xml.
template.xml phpdoc.xml
routing
templates/structure Using twig Using XSLT