Introduction

Hello everyone, this is Loren from Donut Team and today I have some news regarding a major update to our documentation site, DT Docs.

Some History

The previous version of DT Docs was created way back in 2020. Back then, I was fairly new to making websites and it was the most complex site I'd ever created. Naturally, due to my inexperience, it also quickly became a nightmare to maintain!

Fast forward to now and making any sort of updates to this ancient codebase is not ideal and deploying them wasn't either. This includes updating the docs themselves, which were far more tied up in the actual code of the site than they should have been.

Given that we are about to release an update to the Mod Launcher and, consequently, many new documents need to be added to the site, now seemed like a good time to do something about this.

So, for the past few weeks, I've been rebuilding the site as a part of the shared codebase that powers most of our websites.

So, What's New?

First off, this new version shares basically no code with the old site. It has been rebuilt from the ground up. The design was kept similar but it's all new, much better and more maintainable code.

Notable improvements include:

A substantially better Markdown parser that properly implements our custom tokens, such as the tab controls you can find on various documents.
Smarter search that tries at least a bit harder than finding exact matches for your query.
- In addition to the sidebar search built in to DT Docs, searching for documents is also now apart of the global search found at the top of all Donut Team sites.
Support for dark mode, using your account preference if you are logged in to Donut Team.

In addition to the improved code for the site, I also combed through every single document and improved many of them with more and/or better information. You'll still find some TODOs here and there, but generally things are a lot more fleshed out now.

On that note, let's talk about community contributions to the docs.

Community Contributions

Alongside the release of Version 1.27 of Lucas' Simpsons Hit & Run Mod Launcher next month, we will also be making our docs repo public on GitHub. This repo contains the actual Markdown documents, the configuration file for the site's hierarchy, and meta documentation on our Markdown parser's custom tokens and how to use them.

This means anyone will be able to make pull requests to the repo to help improve documentation on various subjects. If something feel someone is lacking or even missing entirely (such as the aforementioned TODOs), you can go in and address it yourself then submit it to us for review. Nifty!

Opening up docs to community contributions is something we've been wanting to do for years, and with the new site, we are finally in a position where we feel comfortable doing this.