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textpattern / textpattern.github.io

Textpattern CMS user documentation.
https://docs.textpattern.com
GNU General Public License v2.0
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Move docs hosting to GitBook, Read The Docs or similar 3rd party service; repo housekeeping #212

Open petecooper opened 9 months ago

petecooper commented 9 months ago

We should consider moving our docs to a hosted service. We have established open source software status so we can tick the right boxes for a gratis plan on GitBook, Read The Docs or other open source-friendly hosted service.

Our docs repo is named after the legacy GitHub Pages URL we used with a DNS CNAME wrapper. We have references to a non-existent repo name in package.json:

https://github.com/textpattern/textpattern.github.io/blob/4327268e343248a56ca13423f6772c5858c31e16/package.json#L7

I've spent most of today trying to replicate the current Jekyll-powered docs site from our old tarzan server to a new server. It's the last holdout from the old 2022-era Ubuntu server that's conspicuous by its absence from the new server fleet. It's also, fiscally-speaking, expensive to have it as the only site on a server that's vastly overpowered for a single Jekyll instance with a hacked-up bag of Bash scripts to keep it running.

I think it works. The fact I can't say it definitively works, dudes annoys me a bit. I'll flip the DNS later today and decommission the old server if it does indeed appear to be probably working (sort of, kinda, ish).

I'll readily admit that Ruby & Jekyll gives me the dependency hell / gem versioning heebie-jeebies, even more so when the acquire & build process is as automated as I'd like it to be. I'm not a Ruby person (evidently), and it's a whole world of stuff that I don't need to learn & maintain for the sake of a docs site when there are competent providers out there that have solved this problem.

Before this turns into me getting on a soapbox, I'm going to throw it open to comments.

Can we consider moving our docs to GitBook or similar, and tidy up the repo, please?

Renaming the repo to the one linked above will keep the commit history, and we can tidy up the branches (and their naming) to keep things shipshape.

Paging @Bloke @bloatware @philwareham for advice.

petecooper commented 3 weeks ago

I've created https://github.com/textpattern/docs-test to track testing.