devportal VS Hugo

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!

At one point though I realized there is a scaling problem with my build minutes. I knew that golang has considerably faster builds and in my case the easy fix is swapping over to Hugo.

This blog is running on Hugo. It had previously been running on Jekyll. Both these SSGs ship with the ability to create excerpts from your markdown content in 1 line or thereabouts.

Hugo

Hugo is a popular static site generator specifically designed to create websites and documentation lightning-fast. Its minimalist approach, emphasis on speed, and ease of use have made it popular among developers, technical writers, and anybody looking to construct high-quality websites without the complexity of typical CMS platforms.

As per many other comments, it sounds like a static site generator like Hugo (https://gohugo.io/) or Jekyll (https://jekyllrb.com/), hosted on GitHub Pages (https://pages.github.com/) or GitLab Pages (https://about.gitlab.com/stages-devops-lifecycle/pages/), would be a good match. If you set up GitHub Actions or GitLab CI/CD to do the build and deploy (see e.g. https://gohugo.io/hosting-and-deployment/hosting-on-github/), your normal workflow will simply be to edit markdown and do a git push to make your changes live. There are a number of pre-built themes (e.g. https://themes.gohugo.io/) you can use, and these are realtively straightforward to tweak to your requirements.

Create the technical documentation of your project You can use any of the following options: * A wiki, like the ArchWiki that uses MediaWiki * Read the Docs, used by projects like Setuptools. Check Awesome Read the Docs for more examples. * Create a website * Create a blog, like the documentation of Blowfish, a theme for Hugo.

Doing this made me appreciate existing SSGs like Hugo and Next.js even more👏👏

I suggest hugo: https://gohugo.io/

Generates a completely static website from MD (and other formats) files; also handles themes (including a lot of them rendering well on mobile), and different types of content - posts, articles, etc. - depending on the theme.

It's open source and, being completely static, cheap as fuck to self host.