Challenge
The expanding Craft CMS documentation covered several products maintained by different people, resulting in stale and missing content, varying tone, and an ongoing challenge to maintain.
Steps Taken
- Consolidated disparate, versioned product documentation into one code base.
- Overhauled the underlying VuePress project to feel more on brand, with customizations to improve structure, clarity, and readability.
- Enhanced reference material with refinements to generators and CI pipelines that narrow the gap between documentation and source code.
- Wrote a self-contained “getting started” tutorial for beginner onboarding.
- Introduced automated testing and linting to help with consistency.
- Responded to issues raised in GitHub, Discord, and support tickets.
- Documented repositories and pipelines responsible for all public documentation.
- Coordinated internally to document changes with increasing efficiency.
Result
The documentation felt more on-brand, became more consistent across products, and kept pace better with product development. My efforts at internal coordination led to discussion about shifting into a project management role.
![Split screenshot of the Craft documentation illustrating light and dark mode, and with navigation for Craft CMS, Craft Commerce, and Craft Nitro](/_astro/craft-docs-landing-light-dark.EBdeOluZ_i23sf.png)
![Tightly cropped screenshot of a “Was this helpful?” widget in a page footer, with thumbs up and thumbs down buttons](/_astro/craft-docs-helpful-vote.gHS4DRCa_Z1SELsl.png)
![Screenshot of the documentation landing, with a search for “install” listing results for Craft CMS, Craft Commerce, and Craft Nitro](/_astro/craft-docs-search.AHLoduow_Z3moHg.png)
![Tightly cropped screenshot of a small banner that reads “This document is for an older version of Craft CMS” with a link to view the latest version](/_astro/craft-docs-version-redirect.RsqdwkXP_LeC6.png)
![Tightly cropped screenshot of a console command whose last argument (`path/to/my-project`) is styled with a little box, whose mouseover title reads “Replace this with your project path.”](/_astro/craft-docs-placeholder.3nWxIgwU_39zzo.png)