Today it’s become clear that Rails-doc 2.0 will be released in under two weeks, the current target being on 17 July. We’ve got a lot of stabilizing work ahead of us, all planned out for the next two weeks. The 2.0 release will include some vital features, the most important of them being…
Versions!
That’s right. It’s the feature that makes or breaks an app like Rails-doc. It’s the feature that has broken most apps like Rails-doc and it’s the feature that will make Rails-doc. In Rails-doc, you won’t have to choose which version’s documentation you want to browse or search, but instead you can view an older version of a certain method or class simply by clicking your favored version from our version time line. The time line features a visualization of the changes that have been made to that specific class or method. You can still find stuff that has been removed in newer versions and in fact we indicate deprecated methods and classes everywhere we list them.
Full text search and Firefox search plugin
We have implemented a full text search to complement our current lightning fast keyword search. If the keyword search runs dry, or if you simply prefer to, you can use the full text search that searches from the entire documentation plus notes that all of You have posted.
We’ve also wrapped up an awesome Firefox search plugin that uses both searches and produces a real power search. It’s a combined I’m-feeling-lucky and keyword search. What it does, is it puts you to the page that was retrieved as a first hit from the full text search and also fills your query to the keyword search so you get the best hit and the hits from the keyword search at once. If the first hit was the one you wanted you can just start browsing – a click anywhere on the page will hide the keyword search results. If you didn’t get lucky, check out the keyword results. And if they don’t have what you’re looking for, a simple press of the return key will take you to the full search results. This power search can be used by simple URLs so you can even link to them.
Other new features
- A dashboard for logged in users
- OpenId support
- Gravatars!
- Included In list for modules
- Tons of minor improvements
Probably the number one feature request we’ve gotten is that we would do to the Ruby API what Rails-doc has done to Rails API. We are not going to mix Ruby into Rails-doc, but we’ll be using Ruby as the primary pilot project when we first begin with APIdock.
Great that you guys heard us for the Version browsing !
I will appreciate OpenId support and Gravatars features a lot as well ;-)
By the way, did you develop your own OpenId support, or did you use a plugin for this ?
Thx
Julien
+1 looking forward to the ruby doc version.
Awesome to see that you guys are continuing development of the Rails-doc platform. I’m excited to see just how good you guys will make it.
@Julien: We’re using the ruby-openid gem.
Is there a high-res os x icon available to use for fluid?
@Will: We do have SVG icons – I’ll try to make them available at the About page after our 2.0 release.
Thanks for the great info. I hope you’ll follow this with some more great content.
Most excellent news. Multiversioning and firefox search begin to put this one step closer to rails-doc replacing my own favorite (gotapi.com/rubyrails).
The only one thing that will make me go back to gotapi is standard Ruby docs (I guess multi-project docs will be deferred to a future version, right?).
Keep up, your release cycles are amazing.
nachokb
One little suggestion.
Every time I’m using rails-doc, I just wish that the search box be positioned with “fixed”. To see what I mean, in the CSS change this
#nav_search {
position: absolute;
right: 0;
top: 55px;
}
with this
#nav_search {
position: fixed;
*position: absolute;
right: 0;
top: 55px;
}
Here, “*position” is a rough attempt at dealing with IE (untested).
nachokb
Looking forward to it. I’ve been very happy with Rails-doc.org since it’s launch.
So, where exactly can I download the firefox plug-in?
@Kristoph: Go to a project (http://apidock.com/rails for example) and click the “Add Ruby on Rails quicksearch to your browser” link.