Public beta of the new SilverStripe documentation website

The short story…
Go play with the new documentation website at beta.doc.silverstripe.org

The slightly longer story...
This year a few SilverStripe community members got together to make a positive change in the documentation learning space. We are pleased to announce that we are today running a public beta of the new documentation site to gather feedback before finally launching the new site by the end of the year (think of it as your SilverStripe community Christmas present).

We have had a lot of discussion over the years from different contributors on the topic of documentation:

• Calling for help in documentation (Ingo Schommer, Jun 2010)
• Content is King: Documentation for SilverStripe (Philipp Krenn, Jan 2012)
• Documentation, oh my! (Will Rossiter, Aug 2012)
• What's up docs? An investigation into SilverStripe documentation (Cam Findlay, Jun 2014)
• Progressing the SilverStripe documentation: Where to next? (Will Rossiter, Aug 2014)?

Having looked back over the SilverStripe documentation site on Way Back Machine recently, it's clear that this will be the first major restructure of the documentation ever.  It is interesting looking back over the evolution of the documentation and I think this next step in SilverStripe's documentation DNA will be a great one.

The old doku wiki documentation circa. 2008/2009.

The SilverStripe powered docviewer documentation site.

With this new documentation site, there have been a few new additions and dividing up longer documentation into more distinct sections. However the main focus was to provide a new information structure and more closely integrate it with the look and feel of the new silverstripe.org ecosystem websites. After the new year we will begin looking at areas of the documentation that are not as comprehensively covered as they should be. It should now be a lot clearer if you want to contribute to the documentation, where to file new articles and we also have section by section "how to" folders for more specific code examples.

Documentation we see is an important asset for learning and building expertise as a SilverStripe developer and also a place to share what you know with others. You never really know how well you understand something until you have to teach it to someone else, the new documentation space gives you a place to do this and is helpful to the whole community.

How can I try the new site?

The beta website is available at http://beta.doc.silverstripe.org, or you can visit the current documentation site and follow the link through to the public beta documentation (there is also a link to get back should you need to refer back to the current site).

Follow the banner link through to the beta documentation.

How can I give you my feedback?

To gather the feedback all in one place we will be using Usabilla, a useful tool to allow you to give us specific feedback about parts of the new site that you think could be improved.

Use the "Feedback" tab to share your thoughts.

We'll look to improve the site iteratively over time and will look to implement any important features prior to the roll out of the beta site as our documentation going forward. So remember to click the "Feedback" link on the right hand side and let us know what you think, you can also optionally leave your email address as once we start improving the site we may be interested in getting in touch and working through your idea further.