As hopefully has been noticed, the Continuent documentation is achieving a pretty good critical mass. The content of the documentation is always the most important consideration. Secondary is making sure that the information in the documentation can be found, and that when reading, you can hover and click to get relevant information so that you can understand the content and information being provided even better.

We’ve got a few different solutions and tips that I think are worth highlighting so that people can use the documentation more effectively.

Searching

When you want to look for something in the documentation, use the search bar right up at the top. The search is available both on the Documentation Library page and within individual documents.

When used on the Documentation Library page, search shows you potential matches across all the documentation for the word or item you are searching for. For example, here where I’ve searched for FAQ. Entries are ranked by the manual according to releases:

When searching within a document, you get shown the items within this document first, followed by matches within other documents:

The search content itself is heavily indexed and designed so that you should go to the right item as the first one in the list.

It also works both on wide terms, for example, Filters, but it also works on commands, and command-line arguments and options within a typical command. For example, type ‘trepctl status’ and you will get not only the key command, but all it’s derivatives. But type in an option, like ‘-at-event’, and you’ll get the explicit entry for that item.

Note that the search is very deliberately not a free-text search. This is to ensure that you get to exactly the right page, rather than all the pages that might mention ‘trepctl status’.

Hover Highlights

When reading the documentation you might come across some terms or information that you are not familiar with. In this case, hover over the item and you’ll get a definition.

Click the highlighted item, and you’ll get taken to the reference page for that specific item.

Deep Linking

I mentioned the mechanics of this process recently, but the use-case within the documentation is that virtually everything of significance is automatically linked to the right, canonical, page for the information.

For example, in the image below, there are links to the various ONLINE and OFFLINE states that can be clicked on, and the same is true for nearly all filenames, options, commands, and all combinations thereof.

Related Pages

In certain sections, links to other pages that might be useful to the current discussion, but which we do not directly link to in reference to another item are listed in the sidebar.

This is supported for related pages:

FAQ entries:

We don’t have entries yet, but release note and Error/Cause/Solution (troubleshooting) links are supported too. Note that these links only appear on pages that have the related items.

Table of Contents Navigation

Immediately above the related pages is the basic navigation section. These are divided into:

• Parent Sections – these are sections at the same level as the current page that you might want to jump to. For example, you can easily jump from Fan-In to Star deployments.
• Navigate Up – Goes up the parent.
• Chapters – A list of all the chapters and appendices in this manual.

Other Manuals

For each page in each manual we also provide a link to the same page in other manuals. There are two reasons for this, the first is so that you can compare or jump to differences in other versions of the same manual. The second is to jump between the Tungsten Replicator and Continuent Tungsten if you find yourself in the right page, but the wrong product manual.

So as you can see, there’s a lot more to the docs than just the content (critical though it is), and hopefully this has helped to explain how usable the documentation is and more important how easy it should be to find the information you need.