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!