To better support our documentation, we need to look at how we generate screenshots.

Currently we manually take, crop, and edit screenshots for the documentation. When a new version of Moodle comes out we should then update those screenshots to match the current theme.

This is not a sustainable solution, and it also leads to inconsistent examples in those screenshots.

We need to create a way to automate the generation of these screenshots, using consistent base data, taking into account the current theme(s), and remaining easy-to-maintain.

I suggest that we write a custom Moodle plugin which uses Behat for this purpose. This already provides much of the functionality with only minor additions required.

We would need:

• additional steps for things like:
  • adding a highlight around to .dom_selector
  • adding an from the [top|left|right|bottom] to .dom_selector
  • taking a screenshot of the current viewport
  • taking a screenshot of the .dom_selector node
• a way to insert a standard set of data for all tests with things like:
  • an agreed site name
  • a consistent set of users
  • a set of pseudo-realistic course categories and courses
  • example images
  • example course content
• a map of scenarios/screenshots to documentation image targets
• a system to run the scenarios and to update the documentation with the newly generated content