New documentation plugin in development

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We have recently made our new documentation plugin available for testing and feedback. This plugin is designed to enhance the navigation and accessibility of documentation hosted on Discourse, providing a more accessible and friendly experience for all users. Note that this plugin is still in development.

The development of this plugin stems from our ongoing effort to improve documentation, which has already been enhanced by a new sidebar. The sidebar work laid the foundation for a much improved documentation experience, and the new plugin incrementally builds upon that work.

:boom: The new plugin in action

The plugin is currently active and powering the documentation on our official Discourse documentation. We invite you to explore its features and share your experiences with us. Your feedback is invaluable in helping us refine and enhance the plugin.

The core features included in the new plugin are:

  • Settings to define which categories are used for documentation
  • A new documentation sidebar populated by index topics within each category
  • Two new reports to help maintain the integrity and accuracy of index topics

With more in development as we continually improve the available features.

The new plugin is available to download and install today: Discourse Doc Categories

:electric_plug: Transitioning from the Discourse Docs plugin

As we innovate and move forward, we will be sunsetting our older Discourse Docs plugin. You can rest assured, however, that we will continue to support it until the new plugin is fully ready for a widespread release. We have also ensured that the new plugin will redirect URLs from the old plugin, so switching over won’t result in any broken links.

Please note that the new plugin is still in its experimental stages. While we aim to provide a seamless experience, there may be some areas that require further improvement. Your constructive feedback will be crucial to its success.

:speaking_head: Let us know what you think

We would appreciate your thoughts, experiences, and feedback. Feel free to share your experiences and any insights you gather while using the new documentation plugin, either by navigating through the documentation on Meta, or installing the plugin on your own site.

Our goal is to shape a better documentation experience for the entire Discourse community, so all feedback is welcome!

Full plugin details available here:

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Someone needs to update the readme. And maybe update the lint rules to keep this from happening, though there is a chicken/egg issue.

It looks like it could also be great for using Discourse as an LMS. For that it would be good to be able to switch which category was a documentation category, though there’s a good chance that just using permissions to give users access to certain categories is enough for it to Just Work.

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Good catch of the URL - I just submitted a PR to add that.

Sounds like an interesting use-case for this, and I can see how that would work quite nicely!

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This is a fantastic improvement over the original Docs/knowledge base plugin. So far seems very user friendly.

Testing on Meta definitely a huge plus as the docs categories here can be hard to find things previously.

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