New SDK docs page!

Ahoy IC devs,

There is a new revamp to the SDK page (https://smartcontracts.org/).

You can also see it hosted on the IC https://hwvjt-wqaaa-aaaam-qadra-cai.raw.ic0.app/ :tada:

There are more pages and more content coming, but please give us feedback so we can improve.

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I particularly like the new information hierarchy: https://smartcontracts.org/docs/current/developer-docs/ic-overview









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What’s the best place to send issues? It seems that some systems didn’t migrate seamlessly. For example this rust tutorial seems to miss some imports :frowning:

Unresolved directive in rust-counter.adoc - include::example$counter-tutorial/counter.rs

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Hierarchy and esthetics are stupendous.

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You can please post here! We’ll take monitor this thread. Thank you!

Super fast!!!

It looks like the Experimental libraries are missing from the Motoko reference. Cycles, InternetComputer, and StableMemory.

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Looks like all the tutorials in Building on the IC → Languages → Rust have the same problem. Just search for “Unresolved directive in” on the pages to find the places where the imports didn’t work.

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Ah, looks like we finally have a useful nested right pane ToC on https://smartcontracts.org/docs/current/references/ic-interface-spec/ and I no longer feel embarrassed to link to it. Although it only goes two levels deep, not three.

Still liking the rendering at https://ic-spec-pr-preview.netlify.app/ more. Better ToC, and it actually renders “Note” and “Warning” sections as such. See right in the first section. That should be looked into, I’d say, as it can be confusing when examples like the one at the end of https://ic-spec-pr-preview.netlify.app/#textual-ids are not marked up.

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@diegop
Hey, good news!

Why do you guys change design of your sites so frequently?
I’ve already seen 4 reincarnations of dfinity.org by now (by the way, the black one with these crazy animations was my favourite).

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Yeap, it felt like DFINITY had to simply the site, way too meta for the current web3 situation imo

Agreed the new one isn’t as catchy

I suggest dfinity to assign some UI designers of the official website to NNS :face_with_peeking_eye:

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Fix is live. Thank for notifying us, @GLdev!

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I noticed you guys ported your new doc site to the IC as well https://hwvjt-wqaaa-aaaam-qadra-cai.raw.ic0.app/docs/current/developer-docs/ic-overview. This is awesome!

A few questions/comments for the team that is doing this @JensGroth

First off, it looks like the documentation search functionality takes maybe ~4 sec or so to load (…loading) and then works.

Are you loading the entire search index into the browser frontend from the IC? If so, it looks like its taking roughly ~4 sec to load https://smartcontracts.org/lunr-index-1651744625942.json (4.72MB) from the IC. This performance isn’t really improved when I try to fetch it again, is this resource not being cached in boundary nodes?

Also, is it easy fit the entire developer doc site onto a single frontend canister or is this being split across multiple canisters?

Is there a public DFINITY repo where we can view and learn from how DFINITY is architecting their frontend repositories (to learn from, etc.)? This is arguably one of (if not the most) polished looking frontend application on the IC right now.

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The lead for this is @ais

I think it’s a single canister, but I’ll ask about this and the search functionality internally.

The repo is here: GitHub - dfinity/portal: Internet Computer Developer Portal and it should (just had a problem with this, but hopefully is fixed now) accept external contributions just fine if you find any problems you’d like to fix yourself.

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Relaying answers from @hugolgst since his forum account can’t post quite yet:

Indeed it takes a bit of time to load. The reason is that we decided to go for a client-side search.
Other tools like Algolia are third-parties, so the website would not have been “fully on-chain”

It’s one canister. We just exported the static files from the React application and we use an asset canister to host them.
It therefore behaves exactly like any other application hosted via a CSR frontend deployment tool (e.g. Netlify, GitHub pages)

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To be honest, I don’t think we have changed the design of the docs page since fall 2019 (not joking!). I work on sdk and docs page, not on Dfinity.org.

To answer about the docs pages: we redesigned and iterated based on feedback. It’s clear that IC developer experience needs to improve, and the docs are one of the first entry points. The harsh truth is that our docs pages were not yielding the Experience folks should have…. And it was not hosted on the IC. So we decided to keep iterating at it.

Was that helpful context?

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In my opinion, the current incarnation of dfinity.org is the most beautiful one yet.

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+1, I think this was a deliberate decision but I think it would have been better to put those experimental libraries under an Experimental sub-section.


BTW, I can’t use the search bar on the IC-hosted docs website (but can on the web2-hosted one).

Wait for 5-6 seconds for the search index to load