Rails-doc.org‘s first release, tagged Sylvester (1.0), is now published live. Check it out and sign up to post notes.
The first release includes two main features:
- lightning-fast keyword search with weighted sorting
- community based notes inline with the documentation
Many other features are included already in this release. Amongst the most important is showing of
visual representations of the importance and relevance of classes/modules/methods initially based on the amount and complexity of their documentation. The formatting of the documentation has been improved vastly and it is now both easy to read and easy on the eye. The formatting also includes nice-looking syntax highlighting which is also used in code examples that you can give as a part of notes.
Each page of documentation has a list of related methods and you can also move to namespaced parents and children. Class and instance methods are separated, so are public and private.
The search feature also includes keyboard controls. After typing in your search query you can move from on result to another by using the arrow keys and move to the chosen result by pressing return.
Notes can be thanked and so we can ensure that good notes are shown more prominently than not-so-great ones. We provide an RSS feed of good notes (notes that have been thanked a few times) for active developers who want to know everything about Rails.
Currently, only documentation for the most recent Rails release, 2.1 is included. The next big release, coming out in a couple of months, will include support for multiple versions of Rails and version handling/separation on class-module-method level.
A technical writer from Italy, called Fabio Cevasco, was kind enough to write an early review. Check it out, if you’d like to read a more extensive first look.