The New Docs Are Here!
Over the last two months or so I’ve been hard at work on a major overhaul of our docs that spans organization, content, and design. And I’m happy to announce, it’s finally live!
The original docs were designed and built during the beta period of the Statamic 3 development, and ran on an early version of the beta itself. Since then there have been many updates to the content, but it wasn’t until now that we took the time to take a few steps back and determine what was working, what wasn’t, and identify gaps in the content.
Everything was under evaluation. The design, organization, architecture, URL structure, each and every letter, and most — but not all — punctuation marks.
I also brought in Dave and Colin from Scruples (some of our awesome Statamic partners) to drive some outside thinking and design ideas. They were immensely helpful for helping me see things from a new perspective, and most of their awesome design work made it in.
The List of Changes
Here’s a fairly summary of what changed as part of this overhaul:
- Brand new design tied more tightly to our brand look and feel
- New and improved search interface courtesy of Algolia DocsSearch v3
- Reorganized a lot of the sections. We replaced vague sections like “Advanced Capabilities” and “Odds & Ends” with “Diving Deeper”, “Addons”, “Starter Kits”, and “Resources”
- Added a new Reference area so you can find all the lists of things (Tags, Fieldtypes, Modifiers, etc) easily
- New collapsable tables of content
- Better sign-posting throughout content (hot tips, best practices, warnings, and inline videos)
- Collapsable, sticky side nav sections to keep it sane
- Breadcrumbs and deeper navigation for better organization
- The Screencasts section has been handed off to our YouTube channel which does a really good job of keeping things automatically organized
- The Knowledge Base has been broken into two areas: Troubleshooting and Tips & Tricks.
- New Install Guides that cover multiple operating systems and cloud platforms
- Over 100 rewritten pages
- Over 20 new pages including the Content Queries, Repositories, and Contribution Guide
- More breathing room for content
- Improved typography and flow for better readability
- A more useful footer area with links to important things
- A promo top bar we can use to tell you about new and important content
- Beautiful new code snippets powered by Torchlight
- A Recent Updates page so you can keep up with changes to the docs
- A sexy new Sponsors area to feature our top GitHub sponsors
- Got rid of most of the JavaScript to make everything faster
- Upgraded to the newest version of Statamic 3
- And lots of little details, easter eggs, and more.
I hope they help! We’re only getting started.