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  • Nicholas Westby 2005 posts 6843 karma points c-trib
    Nov 21, 2015 @ 08:14
    Nicholas Westby
    0

    How'd You Create Your Documentation Website?

    I really like the documentation you are hosting here: http://merchello.github.io/

    I'm embarking on a fairly large project, and I'm going to be hosting the documentation here (it's more or less a placeholder for now): http://www.formulate.rocks/

    Right now, I'm using GitHub pages to serve up that site, which was created with GitHub's automatic page generator.

    I'm curious how you went about creating your site. Is it hosted in GitHub somewhere? Is there some tool you used to generate the site? How did you enable the search box at the top of each page?

  • Kris Janssen 210 posts 569 karma points c-trib
    Nov 21, 2015 @ 10:18
    Kris Janssen
    100

    Hi Nicholas,

    If you create a repo on Github you can quickly and easily associate a project site. But that much you probably already knew.

    Going this route, things might still seem a bit limited and/or primitive.

    However, you can also create (much) more advanced sites using the full functionality of Jekyll. The instructions on how to do that are quite well hidden but the richness of the offert functionality keeps on amazing me. That's also what is used for the Merchello project.

    It might not be a "true" CMS but merely a compilation system that spits out static html, some javascript and CSS but for all intents and purposes, you can do almost anything you could with an actual CMS...

    I just started using it for my own little blog and I have to say I really like it.

    Bonus points because you can clone your site repo, run Jekyll locally and quickly check things before pushing.

    This approach takes much of the overhead away form maintaining your documentation (which is essential if you want to gain traction!!!), giving you more time to focus on dev work...

    On the matter of search and other "advanced" functionality, this is probably a good place to start. Note that Github pages do not support Jekyll plugins but that still isn't too much of limitation.

  • Nicholas Westby 2005 posts 6843 karma points c-trib
    Nov 21, 2015 @ 10:27
    Nicholas Westby
    0

    Awesome. I had already started playing with Jekyll. I suppose the trick then is to find the right theme?

    With a quick Google, this site came up: http://jekyllthemes.org/

    Perhaps I'll start there to see how much I can accomplish.

  • Kris Janssen 210 posts 569 karma points c-trib
    Nov 21, 2015 @ 10:43
    Kris Janssen
    0

    Themes are indeed the largest difficulty although I personally prefer clean and simple. White and a nice readable font (like the one of this forum actually :)

    BTW, I didn't realise you probably asked this question to the Merchello people, sorry for hijacking the thread!

    But it seems they use Jekyll and some of the suff mentioned in the other links (e.g. the search solution).

  • Biagio Paruolo 1494 posts 1635 karma points c-trib
    Nov 25, 2015 @ 06:47
    Biagio Paruolo
    0

    Here is the other docs on Merchello, hosted by their domain on Umbraco CMS and not on github. http://merchello.com/documentation/

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