.. post:: 2011-01-11 02:00:00 Read the Docs Updates ===================== Documentation writing will always be hard work. It's a much different mind-set than programming, and people that write good code might not necessarily write good docs. However, this is a known issue, and something that can't really be solved. What you can do is make it easier to write documentation. Every step along the way that you can give yourself an excuse to not write documentation is another undocumented open source project. Luke Plant has a `great post `_ up about how important documentation is, and I completely agree. I imagine a lot of the people using Django are using it because of the documentation. I think as members of the Django community, we need to build a culture of documentation within the greater Python world. Python does tend to have better documentation than a lot of languages, but it's still not nearly what it could be. `Read the Docs `_ exists to make it easier to host your Sphinx documentation. Over the weekend, `Bobby `_, `Jonas `_, and I added a bunch of new features to the site. I think it's getting to the point where there isn't an easier or better way to host the documentation for your Django project, and we're only going to keep improving it! A different `Eric `_ added a really nice `Getting Started `_ guide for RTD, that shows how easy it is to get your projects hosted with us. Anyway, on to the new features that we added. New Features ------------ Versions -------- Versions of projects are easily one of the biggest requested features on the site. For a long time we just supported building the latest versions of your documentation. Now we support versions of your documentation that are tagged in your VCS (hg/git only). A lot of larger projects need versioning because they support one or two versions, as well as developing in the trunk. Django was the main project we were thinking of, but some other projects have put this to good use. A couple of examples are: - `Django's latest stable build `_ - `Fabric 0.9.3 `_, - `django-admin-tools's awesome integration `_ that has all it's versions hosted with us. PDF Support ----------- Sphinx has interesting support for PDF generation through Latex. In my testing it was pretty unreliable, but I was able to rangle it into working well enough to expose in the UI. So now almost every project will have a "Download PDF" button. This code has version support as well, so we can offer PDFs of certain versions. - `Django's trunk documentation PDF `_ - `Django CMS 2.1.0-rc2 PDF `_ - `Varnish trunk PDF `_ Another interesting part of this feature is that this building code has been abstracted out, so we can support epub, plain text, and all the other Sphinx output formats that people want. Badges on the project pages --------------------------- We killed the RTD header on hosted documentation pages in favor of a Badge in the lower right hand corner. The header clashed with a lot of the themes, and the badge is nice because it gives us a place to put functionality that is always visible, but is obviously not part of the hosted documentation. We want to build some more functionality into the badge, like switching between versions and linking back to the project's RTD page, once we build a good UI for it. Sponsorship ----------- `Revsys `_ has agreed to sponsor the hosting costs for RTD. Jacob Kaplan-Moss has always been a big proponent of documentation, and I'm glad that he and Frank Wiles are helping us keep Read the Docs around and get better. We tried to make the sponsorship subtle and not intrusive, so please let me know if it bothers you and we can try and figure something out. Conclusion ---------- I think that these features are really starting to make RTD a compelling platform for hosting your documentation. We are planning more awesome features that will make RTD even better. I'm really excited about the project and I hope that you either host your docs with us, or find docs that we host useful.