We just launched a new document site template, called Booklet.

Yes, it looks similar to a book and it enables us to provide you with nicely printed PDF versions of your collections.

Now the customers on your remote oil drilling platform are covered with this offline version. Just kidding, but PDF printing has been something many enterprise companies have been asking us for a while, and as you know by now, we listen.

How does it work?

Once you have your domain set for a collection and you enable the PDF feature in the collection settings, we automatically build a PDF version on each publish.

Here's a sneak peek out of our V1 docs: https://app.archbee.io/public/rQfz20MmRdainSGyL3VuF

On Saturday the 20th of November, 9:30 UTC we're taking the system offline to upgrade a few critical systems that need more capacity.

We anticipate up to one hour of downtime for the editor. The published doc sites will keep working uninterrupted at 100% capacity.

You'll get in return a faster, more reliable experience all around!

Knowledge in your team gets outdated, that's a fact.

With Archbee we make it easy for you to keep it up to date — with document verifications.

Select a subject matter expert from your team, and they'll be notified recurrently to check the content of the document.

Here's how it works.

Last week we launched Native OpenAPI for Archbee.

Why is this so awesome for you?

If your product is built for developers or your product has an API, you need great product documentation — otherwise, you can't cut through to developers.

How does it work?

We read your OpenAPI (formerly Swagger) spec files and convert it to a beautiful UI.

Then if you want to update it, you can upload new files manually or just set it up in your CI/CD to be updated automatically through our own API.

Then you keep it for internal purposes, or share it with your customers in just a couple clicks — or even set your own custom domain for 0 engineering effort product documentation.

Here's a video :)

We took our time on this update. But it was worth it! Here are the Updates.

Collection Links: multi-product & multi-version product docs sites

Here's how it works in our documentation (hint, our docs is already using the feature).

Stripey template & our template system are out of beta

We've seen 30% of the entire product website population migrate to the new Stripey template. You can do so in the collection settings.

Vertical Split

A new block has been developed, you can now split the screen vertically. To use it, type (vs) in the editor.

Link blocks

You can now add link blocks, each being formattable and each can have an image attached to it. To use it type (lb) in the editor.

Import from GitBook

Yes, many people asked us.

Import from Notion

Yes, many people asked us.

Import multiple Markdown files

Drag and drop as many .md files as you'd like in the same box, we'll convert them and drop them neatly in an archbee collection.

UI Improvements

• spacings, colors and more have been tightened all over the app;
• new @ mentions indicators, different from external links indicators;
• improved performance in the editor.

Lots more, but it's Sunday so I'm going to keep it short!

Happy documenting from the Archbee team!

Our WYSIWYG editor is nice, but sometimes people just prefer plain-old markdown in a git repo.

This is why with today's new feature, our GitHub App, will allow you to do exactly this.

HOWTO

1. Install our GitHub App in the integration settings and give it access to the repositories that will have the markdown content.

2. Create a new collection. Choose GitHub-backed and then select your repo.

3. Click ADD COLLECTION. We'll fetch the repo and the `/docs` by default.

Many configurations are available. Read up here: https://docs.archbee.io/github-beta

With this release you should also find more robust converters to Markdown everywhere they are used in the app.

Happy documenting! 🥳🎉

Building product docs sites in-house is... time-consuming, de-focusing engineering from the product, error-prone, and... expensive. And in the end, you still lack a nice-to-use CMS for your writers and have to pay for hosting and a search solution.

You can always buy a solution on the market, but there's a big drawback: most solutions don't offer that much customization.

We noticed this a while back and allowed our customers to customize pretty much everything with custom CSS, and custom JS.

While good for many companies, it doesn't seem to be enough for some. 

This is why we've built an entire system that allows us to build documentation site templates very quickly. It's here!

We've also launched the first template for it (beta) — Stripey. Stripey uses Stripe's docs (which is beloved by many developers) as inspiration.

Here's how it looks like on our own docs:

Of course, you still get all the goodies: dark mode, ultra-fast and reliable search, search analytics, authentication options, and rich SEO controls.

Try it out on your docs and let us know what you thought.

Here's what we have planned next for the product documentation sites use case: 

- GitHub Integration (write your docs in GitHub — then use Archbee to generate the site and host it);

- Multi-product sites (use multiple collections on the same site with a tab-switcher similar to Stripe's docs);

- New blocks, many inspired by Stripe's custom made docs;

- i18n;

- Collections as changelogs hooked into the main doc sites.

YAY!

For customer-facing documentation, especially developer docs or API docs, sometimes you need multiple versions, all available at the same time.

For example, while new customers might be using v2 of your API, some of your existing customers will still be on v1 — so they need to read v1 documentation.

Introducing Collection Snapshots, a way to create an identical clone of a collection, that you can then rename to v1 and then keep working on each documentation version separately.

Along with hostname paths, with just a few clicks you can set up a system where multiple versions of the documentation are available.

Enjoy!

As promised to many of you, we're focusing on improving the functionality we already have as opposed to adding new stuff. 

We've improved the performance of the app, the design system, our libraries & code, the self-service abilities of the system.

Here are some highlights:

• custom HTML with handlebars templates in custom footers or custom landing pages for documentation sites; read more here: https://docs.archbee.io/custom-landing-page;
• improved image rendering; we've changed our CDN for images with one that renders sizes dynamically and allows people with smaller screens (e.g mobile) to download the exact size of images they need; we also changed the way image widths/heights are calculated so no layout shifting will happen anymore;
• user downloadable invoices; download any invoice on demand so that you don't have to look for them in your email;
• ability to appoint a new super admin; this also changes the email that Stripe sends invoices to;
• ability to change email address by yourself;
• UI improvements all over; we've tightened our design system even more; more consistent colors and spacing;
• better automatic scrolling in the document tree section;
• improved search algorithm and faster instances on AWS for search indexing;
• we've upgraded most of our code to the latest libraries so you get the benefit of improved performance and security;
• reduced load time for public collections by 20%;
• reduced load time for documents by 25%;
• improved callout blocks;
• more accurate reading time prediction by using a new algorithm;
• faster real-time sync between people looking at the same document;
• better table of contents rendering;
• improved loading time of the knowledge graph on workspaces with 1000+ documents;
• improved document tree drag & drop accuracy;
• improved blockquote rendering.

Enjoy!

We just launched a new feature that allows you to have more control over how your documentation sites look to search engines.

Each document now has specific inputs for the meta URL Key, Title, Description and Image.

The new controls are not required. If you don't set them, we'll generate what we can from the document name.