docsify VS JSDoc

Docsify is frequently updated; the latest release was on June 24, 2023, and the most recent update was on December 17, 2023. It is MIT-licensed and has an active Discord community.

okay new plan, does anyone know how to do this docsify on github? i obviously am a noob on github and recently on reddit. I'd like to help where i can but my knowlegde seems to be my handycap. i could provide you a trash-mail, if you need one, but i need a PO (product owner) to manage the git... i have no clue about this yet (pages and functions and stuff)

The tools to author it aren't that important, frankly. Ask your audience what they're most comfortable using and try to meet them there.

If the stakeholders are technical, you have more options. If they aren't, I hope you like Google Docs or Word, because if you give them anything other than that or a PDF, they'll probably complain. At worst, yeah, write it in a long Markdown text file and use tools like pandoc to transform that into other formats as needed.

If you do need a website and you're not generating enterprise-scale amounts of content (and it sounds like you're not) try things that let you avoid needing build steps and infrastructure if at all possible, so you can iterate and deploy changes with as little friction as you can.

Tools like Docsify[1] can take a pile of Markdown files and serve a site out of them, client- or server-side, without a static build step. Depending on the org, you can get away with GitHub's default rendering of Markdown in a repo. Most static site builds for stuff your scale are overengineered instances of premature optimization.

Past those initial hurdles, the format and tools challenges are all in maintenance. How can you:

- most easily keep the content up to date

- delegate updates as the staff grows or changes

- proactively distribute updates ASAP to the people who'd most benefit from receiving them

That's going to depend a lot more on who'll contribute updates, what their technical proficiency's like, and how they prefer to communicate. It might be a shared git repo and RSS or Slack notifications if they're comfortable with those things, and it might be a Google Doc and email if they're like most non-technical stakeholders.

1: https://docsify.js.org

Big fan of https://docsify.js.org since theres no need to compile your static site. A small amount of js just renders markdown.

If you are searching for examples of an arbitrary Jellyfin support site, visit https://travisflix.com/help/#/support (or help.travisflix.com which redirects to the /help/ URI of the TLD) to take a look at what I have done with docsify on Github Pages.

*Leantime - Competitor to OP? Updated recently, uses Docsify, no demo :(

There are a lot of open-source projects that can help businesses to save time and money. For example, we created a Free Admin panel a few months ago https://github.com/altence/lightence-admin That's an example of free documentation generator https://github.com/docsifyjs/docsify There are a lot more examples. And I want to find an idea of some similar generic solutions that can help various types of businesses

I wholeheartedly agree. At most, I introduce JSDoc[1] to newer developers as standardising how parameters and whatnot are commented at least gets you better documentation and _some_ safety without adding any TS knowledge overhead.

[1] https://jsdoc.app/

This is where JSDoc comes to save the day.

The best way to do this, of course, is with JSDoc. But something I always found awkward about jsdoc is defining the object types in the same file. So, after a lot of reading, I found a way to combine JSDoc with declaration type files from Typescript. Let me give you an example:

There is a lot of specific symbols presented on the JSDOC specification that can be found here: https://jsdoc.app

JSDoc is a specification for the comment format in JavaScript. This specification allows developers to describe the structure of their code, data types, function parameters, and much more using special comments. These comments can then be transformed into documentation using appropriate tools.

Working with new features, frameworks, and tools, the experience of reading documentation is a critical part of it. I have been lucky to work with projects that feature really easy to read documentation such as USWDS and Bun, but I've also had the misfortune to work with pretty terrible documentation like JSDoc. The JSDoc documentation lacks a search field which makes searching for specific items an ordeal and also does not cover many hidden use cases. It provides less than the bare minimum for what it needs to do - a lot of the time I am forced to rely on external user documentation elsewhere to use JSDoc effectively. That was why I was drawn to the search field in particular in Docusaurus.

The Svelte team followed suit but motivated by the maintainer's developer experience as they migrated the project away from TypeScript in favor of plain JSDoc comments for type annotations instead.

Even more relevant, tools like Javadoc, JSDoc, Doxygen, etc. read comments in a specific format to generate documentation. These comments do not affect readability. On the contrary, Javadocs are great for explaining how to use these entities. Combined with tools like my dear Doctest, we even get guarantees of accuracy and correctness!

Document types with JSDoc annotations

📚 JSDoc for documentation and jsdoc-to-markdown to create docs as markdown files