If you have been using Mathematica for a while you probably have grown attached to the documentation center. There is always something new that you find in those pages. Let it be options for a function or just some examples that at some point did not seem useful to you.
It is likely that you have written packages with your specialized functions that you use all the time. Sometimes you might think of a neat example to use with your function but it is likely that it ends up being forgotten somewhere in your hard disk. If you had written it to the documentation at the moment you thought of it maybe you wouldn't be looking for it desperately later on.
For this reason I would like to know how to integrate documentation for your own functions with Mathematica's documentation center programmatically. This question is here to explore how to adapt documentation. If you have written scripts that help you do this, please share it with the community.
Wolfram's Workbench is not an acceptable solution for this question. Everything must be done with the plain installation of Mathematica. There is a couple of points that the solution should cover:
?SymbolSearch: SymbolThis is a really broad topic, I have solutions for 1, 2, and 3. I'm missing point number 4. So tell us, how do you document your functions with the documentation center?
I have added another answer. Hopefully this answer is more encouraging to users of Mathematica to write documentation pages with their packages. I think that writing documentation pages is beneficial to the application writer as well as the users of the application. If you download the package I wrote I suggest you follow the tutorial so that you can see what happens in every step. This will give you valuable experience for future projects.
Since I wrote the package there has been several people interested in this package. I have uploaded the package to Github: https://github.com/jmlopez-rod/ApplicationMaker. Please contact me if you would like to be a contributor to the repository.
It took me while but I have finally finished writing a documented Mathematica application to help Mathematica users write their documented packages.
This application is called ApplicationMaker. It contains three packages with various functions to help you create the application. By using these functions you can skip going through all the mess I had described in my previous answer.
If you download ApplicationMaker from my website you will find a detailed tutorial showing you how to create a complete application with its documentation.
To create a new application you start by calling NewApplication. This creates the directory tree I mentioned in the previous answer. To find more about Mathematica's file organization click here.
The next step is to create the packages. For that you call NewPackage. This function creates a template where you write your code.
When you finish writing your code you need to call UpdateInit. This updates the init file that Mathematica needs so that you can use the function Get (<<).
At this point you are ready to create the documentation. Simply call CreateReferencePages and this will create a basic document that you can edit to document the reference pages for each symbol in your application.
If you want to create a guide or a tutorial for your application then you can call NewGuide and NewTutorial.
When you are done doing your edits you need to build your application so that Mathematica can adapt it to its documentation center. You do this by calling BuildApplication.
At this point you are done. If you use Information on any of the symbols of your package you should see an arrow appended that leads you to the reference page for that symbol.
If you wish to share this application you should first deploy it. The current application contains the reference pages which work with the documentation center and those that you edit. By deploying it you obtain a directory with only the necessary files for your application to work.
All you have to do is drop the folder ApplicationMaker in $UserBaseDirectory/Applications/ or $BaseDirectory/Applications/.
To get started open up the documentation center and look for "ApplicationMaker". This should show you the guide showing all the functions that the package contains. At the very bottom you should see a link to the tutorial.
This is the first application I have ever build for Mathematica. I will try to keep updating the package I as discover new things to make the package better. For now, I hope that this first version of ApplicationMaker is useful to anybody trying to document their Mathematica applications.
You may download ApplicationMaker here.