New documentation sites

To help my clients get the best out of my plugins, I’ve recently built two new documentation sites. One for Weight Tracker and the other for Meal Tracker.

Previously these sites were built with WordPress, which means I had two additional websites to maintain (even though easier as part of a multisite). The biggest struggle for me, and probably most developers, is getting the motivation to update the documentation with every new release!

I wanted to remove the need of WordPress for each documentation site and ensure I had a way to deploy documentation alongside my code deploys. After some research I settled on using GitHub Pages – this allows me to write documentation in Markdown and store it in a folder alongside my code! So, moving forward, every time I make changes to the code of my plugins, I’ll make sure to change the documentation at the same time. This cuts out the retrospective documentation update which always leads to things being missed!

What I really love about using GitHub pages is when it’s teamed with Jekyll. Jekyll takes the Markdown files I’ve produced and converts them into HTML files when triggered by a Github action.

So now, my deploy flow looks like this:

Finished coding. Push. Merge branch into master. Github action using Jekyll rebuilds documentation site. Tag Release. Github action using 10ups WordPress deploy tool pushes the build to WordPress SVN for deploy.