Background and history

Documenting any software product is a difficult task. We tried a number of options for GGCE documentation in the past. Each of them had specific advantages, but more importantly, all had significant disadvantages.

In short, welcome to our new site for GGCE documentation!

Gitlab Wiki

The first approach we tried were the Wiki pages in Gitlab. This made sense, since Gitlab is where all the development happens, and we could keep the documentation in the same system. We continue with this approach to share the release notes.

We soon learned that the Wiki is not a very friendly tool for our writers, and does not allow proper formatting and layout of the documentation, so we adopted the most traditional of all approaches: Word documents.

Word documents

With Word documents we could use consistent styling, layout and branding across the documents, especially when packaged as PDF.

But then translating of the documentation became an issue, and we still had no catalog of all the documents. Next step: a GGCE website.

A static website

We developed a website to explain and promote GGCE, and to host links to the documentation. This was a static website, but used React under the hood which allowed for dynamic content.

The custom website still lacked the tools for easy content creation, management and translation. And then we came across Docusaurus.

Docusaurus

We noticed that a number of libraries and tools that we use in GGCE development use Docusaurus, and after digging into its features it became obvious that it already provides the tools we would otherwise need to develop specifically for our static website.

So here we are, and this is just the beginning.