PAMMS Help

The materials and resources provided by this site will prepare you to write, edit, and manage the policies and related materials published on the Georgia Department of Human Services Policy and Manual System (PAMMS). You can use the navigation on the left side of the PAMMS Help page to quickly navigate to specific sections and training guides.

The PAMMS system uses GitLab to maintain the Policy documents, structure of the website, and facilitate the tracking, review, and approvals for each policy update. The IntelliJ IDE application to for Policy documentation editing and to facilitate and streamline the updates to GitLab.

The first step to utilize the PAMMS system is to complete the initial registration and application installation.

Prerequisites - Creating a GitLab Account

Register for a gitlab account following the Initial Registration Guide

If you fail to register for a Gitlab account first, the SSO provider will not have a DHS email address to associate with in step 1 below.

  1. Connect Gitlab with Single Sign On Provider at the SAML Site

  2. Request access to your respective Program repository.

  3. Install git on your computer using the following link.

Getting started

The quickstart pages walk you through the basic steps you need to complete to start editing a policy on your own computer and submitting your updated policy for review and publication to the PAMMS site.

  1. Downloading IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition

  2. Installing IntelliJ IDEA

  3. Starting IntelliJ and Installing the AsciiDoc Plugin

  4. Connecting GitLab account to IntelliJ IDEA

  5. Cloning a PAMMS Repository

  6. Opening and Editing a Document

  7. Branching, Committing, and Pushing Changes

  8. Pushing Change and Opening Merge Requests

Once you’ve completed the quickstart pages, it’s time to dive deeper.

Site, project, and file organization

You may be wondering:

Why is my program in its own repository on GitLab, but listed under the Division of Family and Children Services on the PAMMS site?

  • The site, project, and file organization pages explain why the files in a repository are organized how they are, why their names matter (and what happens if you change them), and why they end up on the PAMMS site at a certain URL and in a certain place in the navigation.

  • The navigation site explains terminology, site overview and the navigation menus.

  • The file organization site explains folder structure, repositories, and terminology.

Can I delete the modules folder?

  • No, this is vital to the structure of the page

Can I rename the pages folder?

  • No, this is vital to the structure of the page

Can I save images to the pages folder?

  • No, this is in a separate directory modules/ROOT/images and is reference in the pages as image::file_name.jpg[image_description]

Why aren’t there any spaces, underscores, capital letters, commas, or emojis in the file or folder names?

  • These characters may become part of a URL when the file is published to the PAMMS site; in turn, these characters in the URL can negatively affect people with certain accessibility needs or using accessibility tools. Also, AsciiDoc, Antora, some web servers, and some browsers forbid them or strongly discourage them.

Writing with AsciiDoc

Most of the policy documents in PAMMS are written using AsciiDoc. Let’s get down to the nitty-gritty and learn how to: