Tools

A new experience for documentation and developer resources

By
Wednesday, 26 October 2016

Today marks a milestone in our efforts to provide developers with the most useful news, resources, and documentation. We are launching an entirely new version of dev.twitter.com – both the infrastructure and design have been rebuilt from the ground up.

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The infrastructure

Until today, the Twitter developer website was built on top of a CMS used by several teams at Twitter. This afforded consistency and made updates fairly easy for anyone familiar with the CMS, but with limited templates and broad styles, we weren’t fully optimized to display developer content. Additionally, significant updates to the developer site – such as adding new pages – took quite a bit of time coordinating with multiple teams and vying for resources.

Now, dev.twitter.com is running on a new infrastructure that allows us to iterate faster. The source code is stored in a repository that utilizes a review process familiar to all Twitter Engineers. Most of this content is in the form of ReStructured Text (RST), which Sphinx turns into static files.

We will go into further detail about this process in a future article.

The design

We also took advantage of this infrastructure improvement to evaluate how we display our resources and documentation. Starting at the homepage, you will notice a huge difference. The top banner offers quick links to important resources and announcements, followed by links directly to Twitter Platform products, and finally a grid of Tweets to catch the latest updates and events from @TwitterDev.

A few new sections have been added as well. “Products” offers an entire breakdown of Twitter Developer Platform products and is a great resource to find more information or documentation. “Build” provides development scenarios and suggested products based on those scenarios, which will continue to see new content over time. And lastly, there’s “Community” where you can find a local Twitter Developer Community or start your own, keep up to date with our events, and visit our developer forums. More details about Twitter Developer Communities will be coming soon.

Additional design improvements address issues we’ve heard from several developers, such as bringing a responsive design, and better display of tabulated information and parameters in the documentation.

Looking forward

Collectively, we hope these improvements will make it easier to find what you need as a developer, and allow us to iterate faster on new content and documentation updates.

As with any new site, it may have some initial issues, and we would love your feedback – for bugs as well as general content suggestions and questions. The “dev.twitter.com feedback” category on twittercommunity.com has been created specifically for this purpose, or you can always Tweet at @TwitterDev.

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