Yesterday, I've rolled out a new version of the symfony.com documentation section and a new version of the search engine.

Version support

The documentation for Symfony master is now available. The current version still points to 2.0, but if you replace it with master, you will navigate the documentation for the upcoming 2.1 version (and the same goes for the bundle documentation).

Language support

I'm really happy to announce that the Italian translation team has finished the translation of the documentation to Italian (both for the 2.0 and master branches). They are also committed to update it on a regular basis, so take a minute to thank them for their hard work. You can read more about contributing to the translations of the Symfony documentation if you want to help this team or any other one.

Better display

Many Symfony developers are quite picky about the display of the documentation and code examples; with their help, we have enhanced the display with many CSS tweaks.

Better SEO URLs

As we have added language and version support to the documentation, we have worked hard to ensure that every page has a unique canonical URL so that Google is not confused. But we have also added many shortcuts and redirections so that guessing a URL for a piece of documentation should be easier.

Search engine

Talking about search engines, we have totally rewritten the code managing the symfony.com search engine (thanks Xavier).

Of course, we have added support for the all languages and Symfony versions; you can now specifically search for documentats in Italian targetting the 2.0 Symfony version for instance. The results display is also better and you can now filter them by "category". As an added bonus, we have added the blog posts to the index so that you can find any blog post back from 2005 more easily (I have actually used it to help me write this blog post).

API

Some time ago, we have updated the API section of the website to include all released versions of Symfony and of course the master branch too.

OpenSearch

For a better experience, we have added OpenSearch support for both the documentation and the Symfony API. If you are using Firefox, the Symfony search engines will show up automatically in the search engine menu when browsing the documentation or the API.

What's next?

We have many items on our todo list but in the next coming weeks, you can expect more enhancements:

  • a way to easily switch from one version or language to another one;

  • API documentation for the bundles;

  • Downloadable PDFs for all the documentation.

If you think that the documentation or the search engine can be enhanced in any way, please don't hesitate to provide feedback.

Help us enhance the Symfony 2.1 documentation

Last, but not the least, we need more people helping the documentation team. We have a lot of outstanding tickets and almost anyone can help fix some of them. Thanks for your help.

Published in #Documentation #Living on the edge