devportal VS docToolchain

Hello folks, I am running a tech writing team (along with product management). I am not expert in documentation platforms. Today we have a challenging custom-built documentation platform based on Sphinx and a bunch of cobbled together technologies aiven/devportal: Resources for users of the projects on the Aiven platform (github.com) . Our documentation is in .rst markup language due to the Python focus.

Humble brag that the last one in the list (Aiven 🦀) won 2022 DevPortal Awards in the category Best DevPortal Beyond REST Platforms. If I added a list of great docs websites but didn't include the OG, it would be a crime. Check out one of THE BEST documentation out there - Stripe Docs, built using Markdoc.

You can find a list of Aiven's cloud providers on [Developer.aiven.io], which is also the portal where we host the developer documentation. To quickly retrieve a list of currently-available cloud providers, my colleague Lorna Mitchell wrote a Python script that pulls our cloud listing from the Aiven API and generates documentation, which is really cool!

An implementation of the docs-as-code approach, docToolchain is a collection of scripts that makes it easy to create and maintain powerful technical documentation. It is a popular open-source project that uses jBake under the hood as the SSG. docToolchain can publish to Confluence, generate PDF using an Asciidoctor plugin, and more.

[1] Gradle based, which is probably why it's fading a little bit. https://github.com/docToolchain/docToolchain

In addition to this, the focus will be laid on exporting data and integration with other tooling. This includes a convenience library for programmatic processing, static site export, and a set of recipes, e.g. for integrating with things like docToolchain.