Important updates to this post ⬇️

sphinx-rtd-theme 1.2.0 has been released with support for Sphinx 6.

In this post we spread the word about the most relevant news of the Sphinx ecosystem of the past weeks, including Sphinx itself as well as extensions and themes developed by the community.

Sphinx 4.4 was released on January 17th with numerous changes, including:

Recently, we published a guide on SEO for technical docs with the goal of helping documentation authors and project maintainers create docs so that end users can find what they’re looking for easier.

One developer asked me point blank after I mentioned our new guide, “Hasn’t Google closed most of the loopholes that sites use to rank better?”. I’ve heard this opinion from a few technologists before so I wasn’t too surprised. Moz.com, an authority on search engine optimization, makes a distinction between what they call black hat SEO and white hat SEO to differentiate between these “loopholes” and more useful site improvements that help SEO.

In the Read the Docs documentation, we have a number of how-to guides to help people solve specific problems with Sphinx and Read the Docs. By far our most popular guide is on adding custom CSS and JavaScript to Sphinx.

In some older versions of Sphinx, this process was a little more challenging and it wasn’t as easy to figure out how to do it from the Sphinx docs. Sphinx 1.8 really streamlined this process especially for the simple cases.