Document Status

Lifecycle Model

Documents like guidelines or project documentations have a lifecycle. This extension provides four different states for a Sphinx document:

Created	The document is in a very early stage, incomplete and potentially includes wrong information.
Draft	The document was reviewed and is already in a good shape. Some parts may still be missing but the existing information is reliable.
Verified	The document is complete and trustworthy. No review findings are open. It was also checked regarding formal aspects.
Released	The document is approved and valid.

Usually a document lifecycle also consists of a status like Under Review, but if pull requests are reviewed within a review tool before being merged, this status is not explicitly needed for published Sphinx files.

The status can be changed at any time. But every status change should be reviewed within a review tool before being merged. This also applies when deleting the document.

A typical lifecycle looks like this:

Setting a State

To enable the documentation status label, set a default value in conf.py like this:

html_context = {"document_status_default": "Draft"}

To overwrite the status of a document add the following directive at the top of the rst-file:

:document_status: <status>

Example:

:document_status: Released

Some Title
==========

Some text...

Aliases

The following states are mapped automatically when using in RST files:

• Raw –> Created

• Valid –> Released