Support marking a version as current

[stof]

To improve the SEO referencing of the documentation, it would be great to be able to mark a version as the current one (accessible using current as version in the URL), and having the documentation for this version getting a canonical URL set to the /current/ version. This way, when looking for a topic in google or following a link in a blog post, it would send us to the documentation for the current minor version rather than sending us to the version of the doc rather than an outdated version (the one at the time the blog post was written). To see the difference it makes, compare googling for Symfony documentation topics or MySQL ones. 90% of the times, you get a result in the MySQL 5.0 doc (released more than 11 years ago, and end of life since many years too), without an easy way to get the new doc about the same topic (URLs may have changed between versions)

[stof]

note: on RTD, we currently have latest and stable which are available for the Behat documentation (both of them pointing to v3.0). We may need to provide BC for the URLs docs.behat.org/en/(stable|latest)/* to avoid breaking existing links

[everzet]

Thought about /latest this morning.

[stof]

I would prefer /current than /latest though. Logically, latest would point to your master branch, which has the latest code. But if the master branch is not stable (WIP of a new major version for instance), you might prefer having the previous version as main one. And in this case, naming it /latest would be weird. /current is more meaningful in this case (I assume that this is the goal of /stable in RTD, but I don't think we need both /stable and /latest)

[ciaranmcnulty]

This would be great between minor versions, I'd worry about the impact on users who are looking specifically for the 2.5 docs.

Some sites implement a 'This is not the latest version' banner on older docs with a link to current, that would be less good for people looking for current though.

[ciaranmcnulty]

(An example would be someone looking for MinkExtension 1.0 config)

[everzet]

Yeah, not sure about /current as depending on the package there could be multiple "current" versions :/

[ciaranmcnulty]

most-recent ?

[everzet]

@stof thoughts?

[stof]

even when you have several maintained versions, I think you can mark one of the as the current one (the latest of these versions generally). current is not the same than maintained

[everzet]

I think being able to choose latest version is out of the scope for the time being. But we surely need some algorithmic way to choose latest or current to start with.

[stof]

For the first release, we can say that current is master when it is there, or the higher version number otherwise.

[everzet]

That's what I though. More important question - latest, current or something else?

[stof]

I would vote for current

[jakzal]

:+1: for current.

[ciaranmcnulty]

:+1: current. latest sounds temporal, current sounds usage-based