KoboToolbox user documentation

This repository contains all the user content of KoboToolbox's official documentation, available at https://support.kobotoolbox.org/.

Before you open an issue…

Please note that the purpose of the issue tracker on this repository is to track work on the technical infrastructure of the documentation site. For requests related to the content of the documentation, please:

• Post in Zulip #Kobo support docs if you are a member of the Kobo team
• Otherwise, please share your feedback through our Community Feedback Form
• For support requests or bug reports, please post in the Community Forum

Local installation

To build and test this documentation locally follow these steps:

Prerequisites:

• Python 3.10 or later (Python 3.13+ supported)
• git
• npm

1. Open terminal
2. Clone repository: git clone https://github.com/kobotoolbox/docs.git
3. Change into the cloned directory: cd docs
4. Build the theme if you made any changes to it: npm install && npm start
5. Create a virtual environment: python -m venv koboenv
6. Activate the virtual environment source koboenv/bin/activate
7. Install requirements pip install -r requirements.txt
8. Build the html files: make html
9. Open the index page in the browser: open _build/html/index.html

Note: if you have Python 3, you might need to use python3 command instead of python (and pip3 instead of pip).

Each commit to master is automatically built into production.

Development

When you already did everything from "Local installation" succesfully and just need to come back and work a bit more on the project, please use dev.sh script from the root of the project.

Internationalization

The documentation supports multiple languages. The structure is:

• source/ - English content (default language)
• locales/es/ - Spanish translations
• locales/fr/ - French translations

Building translated documentation

To build everything (English plus all translated locales) in one step:

make html-all

This builds English into _build/html/ and each locale into _build/html/<lang>.

To build a single language on its own:

# Build English (default)
make html

# Build Spanish
sphinx-build -b html locales/es _build/html/es

# Build French
sphinx-build -b html locales/fr _build/html/fr

Adding new translations

1. Create the translated file in locales/[lang]/ with the same filename as the English version (e.g., locales/es/new_article.md)
2. Add the file to the corresponding locales/[lang]/index.rst toctree

Translating UI elements (header, search, footer, etc.)

The article content lives in the .md/.rst files, but the surrounding theme chrome — the header navigation, language picker, search box, feedback prompt, footer, and homepage forum/academy sections — is translated directly in the Jinja templates.

Each template that contains UI text defines a translation dictionary keyed by language code and selects the entry for the page's language. Sphinx exposes the current language as the language variable (set per locale in each conf.py: source/conf.py is en, locales/es/conf.py is es, locales/fr/conf.py is fr). The templates fall back to English when a language is missing.

The templates that hold translatable strings are:

• source/_templates/partials/header.html — nav links + language picker labels
• source/_templates/partials/search.html — search heading, description, placeholder, button
• source/_templates/partials/community_questions.html — forum and academy sections
• source/_templates/layout.html — breadcrumb, "back to top", feedback prompt, footer

A typical block looks like this:

{% set lang = language or 'en' %}
{% set translations = {
  'en': { 'heading': 'What do you need help with?' },
  'es': { 'heading': '¿Con qué necesitas ayuda?' },
  'fr': { 'heading': 'Comment pouvons-nous vous aider ?' }
} %}
{% set t = translations.get(lang, translations['en']) %}

<h1>{{ t.heading }}</h1>

To update or correct a UI string: edit the matching value in that template's translation dictionary.

To add a brand-new UI string: add the key to every language in the dictionary (English is required as the fallback) and reference it with {{ t.<key> }} in the markup.

To add a whole new language (e.g. de):

1. Add the language code to LOCALES in the Makefile.
2. Create locales/de/conf.py with language = 'de'.
3. Add a 'de' entry to the translation dictionary in each template listed above, and add the language to the picker in header.html (the languages list and the current_label map).
4. Translate the locales/de/ content files as described in "Adding new translations".

The language picker

The dropdown language picker is rendered in source/_templates/partials/header.html and styled in sass_source/sass/_header.scss (the .language-picker__* classes). It links to the current page in each locale using relative paths, so it works from any page depth. Remember to run npm start after changing the SCSS so the compiled CSS in source/_static/css/ is regenerated.

Note: the homepage "Topics" heading uses a .. rst-class:: topics-section directive (instead of relying on the auto-generated #topics id) so the homepage grid styling survives translated headings such as "Temas" / "Sujets". Keep that directive when editing any locale's index.rst.

Custom theme development

We build our theme atop Read The Docs theme by replacing their CSS with our own (which is a heavily modified copy of theirs).

To develop the theme:

1. Install NPM dependencies: npm install
2. Build:
3. To watch for style changes use npm run dev
4. To build the styles once use npm start

Useful links:

• Jinja - templating language used in .html files
• Official Sphinx documentation
• Alabaster theme source code
• Sphinx source code
• Basic Sphinx theme source code