What are your team members looking for and not finding answers?

What about what are your customers looking for and not finding answers?

You can ask them (and you should), but you can also look at it. 

We got you with search analytics, fresh off the stove. Now you can see what queries your team & customers ask and write the content so the next people asking those queries will have a better experience.

Here's how it looks like :)

Another thing we couldn't resist doing was messing with the search engine, and now it's a lot more flexible. 

Typo tolerance and context understanding with a custom Elasticsearch analyzer are now online. We're still tweaking this but from the first batch of feedback, it seems to be a winner. 

🖖

Dark mode is finally here!!!

You can now switch between three modes: Light | Dark | OS (takes it from the operating system)

The OS mode is particularly interesting because you might have a schedule for it. For example, it might become dark after a certain hour, to allow you to sleep better. Well, Archbee will change automatically to your Operating System value.

Here's a sneak peek.

One more thing...

The hosted doc sites also support Dark Mode 😃 

But to be a good experience for your users, you need to set a Logo and Accent color that works with the dark theme, so we also allow you to do that.

Welcome to the dark side!

What a day on ProductHunt!

Thanks to all your support, we made it to top 1 when we launched Archbee 2.0!

ProductHunt called us a "Google Docs alternative" a few days later in their newsletter. Flattered and humbled!

But there's no resting on the laurels... here's what we released today.

Workspace-Level Domains

One of our cool & distinctive features is that you can share collections of documents on your domain.

But each domain was bound to a single collection. That made it hard for everybody:

• companies with multiple products had to set a different subdomain for each product's documentation; 
• agencies with multiple customers (like you'd find an agency with a single customer, haha) had to set a different subdomain for each customer they wanted to share docs with;
• every new domain had to be set in the DNS provider, taking too much time, and DNS propagation is really slow sometimes;
• that also made it hard for us because we had to supply many SSL certificates, and that's not easy, or cheap.

The alternative was sharing the collections with an archbee.io link, and that worked for some companies, but it didn't for those that wanted a more professional look.

Super happy to announce we now made it possible to share multiple collections on the same domain, by having a path on each collection, while maintaining the root path for a single collection. 

It was one of the most requested features!

Here's how you do it:

Publish-Mode!!

Our automatic save feature and collaborative experience made it easy to create docs by not having to click any unnecessary buttons.

That's awesome for internal team documentation and collaboration.

But for customer-facing documentation, it's not a good look to have them see unfinished work or drafts.

This is why we now have publish-mode, which snapshots your collection and deploys it to your domain.

You get to keep the archbee.io staging link that points at the real-time collection, and a production environment to which the snapshot is deployed at your domain. 

Publish-Mode gets activated whenever you have a domain set on your collection.

This new feature also introduces clean URLs. We only add the randomly generated string at the end of the URL if you have another doc named exactly the same. To get the new URLs you have to publish once.

Here's how it looks like:

Enjoy your holidays, and we'll see you soon with more blazing features.

🖖

Documentation is great for moving your team forward faster.

But it's also great for your customers: you'll reduce support response time, and even the number of support queries.

Our doc sites development has been in the background for a while, but more and more companies need reasonably-priced documentation sites, and sometimes they need API docs and many technical features. 

We've been improving building docs sites with custom landing pages, custom CSS, custom Footers HTML, custom include headers and JS.

Some companies also need private-public documentation, this is why we had password protection and guest accounts. But guest accounts management is a hard job, so now JWT authentication is available to automate it, here's the documentation for it.

Our code editor needed some improvements in regards to UX and UI.

It's now faster, more integrated to the platform, and provides easier ways to add and edit code samples.

Our API docs also needed some 😍

Now it's much faster & intuitive, and it uses the same code editor for the code samples. And it nicely shows in the table of content.

Happy documenting from the Archbee team!

You now have the option to bulk export your content from our platform.

Go to https://app.archbee.io/settings/teams and click on the download button on your workspace (only admins can do this).

You (and all admins in your workspace) will receive an email with a link to a .zip file containing everything in your workspace (content + users).

Sunday 25th of October 10 AM PDT we're doing some backend infrastructure changes that will improve the system overall.

We anticipate 30-60 minutes of downtime.

UPDATE: no downtime was required.

We just released the beta of our Jira integration.

To activate it, go to https://app.archbee.io/settings/team-integrations, click Connect Jira and you'll be redirected to JIRA to approve our app. 

After it's approved, you can paste any JIRA URL into our editor, the issue will be embedded and will self-update as the JIRA issue is updated.

Our largest UI change to date is here!

Here are the details:

Three-column layout -> Two-column layout

The three-column layout was problematic:

• for teams with a medium to high number of docspaces it was cognitively overloading;
• for teams with a low number of docspaces, the first column was mostly empty;
• the colors made it look like the important thing was the first column, when in fact the organization of documents is secondary or even tertiary in importance;
• it moved the editor too far right on the screen, making it hard for people to focus on it when writing;
• it was hard to get right on smaller screens, even on 1366px; not enough screen real estate on most screens out there;
• it was too different from most other systems out there, so people didn't immediately recognize the pattern, introducing friction;

So we decided to combine the first 2 columns into 1, and pick different colors.

UI Improvements across the app

We made a huge number of small adjustments to colors, spacings, and the blocks are more tightly integrated. The cleanest design in Archbee to this date!

Of course, we couldn't resist and improve more than 20 interactions, as UX is the most important an app like ours can offer :)

Docspaces -> Collections

The concept of docspaces (document organization) was also alien to most people, and it was easy to confuse it with workspaces (company/people organization), so we decided to rename it to "Collections".

Favorite Collections

Lastly, we introduced the concept of Favorite Collections, as most people only interacted with 3-4 docspaces and they had to scroll and visually search for what they needed. Even if you could drag and drop to organize them to your needs, the overload was still there.

What are we working on next? (subject to change)

• API docs template similar to Stripe and Readme with the API docs and example side by side;
• Google Drive, Asana, JIRA, GitHub, Zapier: all authenticated integrations;
• Dark Mode;

Get in there, play with it and let us know in the chatbox how you feel about this important change in the app!

We moved our website to new technology, so now our app now lives at https://app.archbee.io

All existing links will automatically redirect to the new URL.

This is a breaking change for the native apps, which will not work until you upgrade to the latest version (should be automatic, prompting you to reload the app to apply the new version).

We don't predict any downtime, but if there is, please go use the new https://app.archbee.io for the app which should work without any change after logging in.

🔗