🚀 We started testing a new flyout menu as part of our beta test for documentation addons. The beta test is currently limited to projects using the build.commands configuration key.

🛣️ We continue to have a number deprecations in progress. We announced this month deprecations of installing using system packages, the configuration key build.image, and installation of pinned versions of Sphinx and MkDocs. Keep an eye on your email for any deprecation notifications, as we will continue to notify maintainers of projects that might be impacted.

🏝️ A few team members took vacations this month, and everything kept running smoothly, which is always wonderful to see.

⏩ Our git cloning code was refactored, and now projects should be building much faster. The more git branches and tags you have, the faster the build will be.

🚀 We shipped support for customizing the URL path for projects and subprojects, allowing you to remove or customize the /projects/ path on subprojects. This is enabled via Support request currently, and only on certain plans on Read the Docs for Business.

🛣️ Deprecations underway: We have a number of old feature deprecations underway. The goal here is to reduce complexity of our build platform, and enable users to control their own builds via build.tools and build.commands instead of feature flags. Keep an eye on your email for any deprecation notifications that might impact your project.

⚠️ A .readthedocs.yaml configuration file will be required for your future builds. Read more about this change in Migrate your project to .readthedocs.yaml configuration file v2.

✅️ Visiting a language slug of a project without specifying the version now redirects to the default version. For instance, /en/ redirects to /en/latest/.

🚁️ The proxy application El Proxito has been rewritten. El Proxito resolves URLs for all documentation websites hosted on Read the Docs. The new rewrite improves the performance of the resolver and makes it possible to add planned features.

🔎️ …One of the new features available in the new El Proxito implementation, is an improved 404 page (see the screenshot below). The new 404 page is contextualized and contains better error messages and tips for users and project owners. We are gradually rolling out the new El Proxito while monitoring its stability, and users will experience new features only on projects where it has been enabled.

📚️ Over the past ~6 months, we gradually refactored our user documentation to align with the Diátaxis Framework. The results are now manifested in the structure of the navigation sidebar and the landing page on docs.readthedocs.io.

📊️ All of our websites now use Plausible for analytics.

⭐️ We passed our 10,000th issue/pull request on GitHub. And it’s pretty much an equal split between the 5039 issues and 4872 pull requests now registered. Thanks to the whole community for building this together through code, issues, suggestions… and documentation!

🌪️ Follow up: Build times have gone rapidly down after last month’s introduction of parallel uploading of artifacts with rclone. Depending on the number of files in your build output, build times may have gone down several seconds or several minutes. For instance, a large project like Write the Docs has gone down from ~7 minutes to under 3 minutes. If you want to see the change for your project, have a look at your build times before and after February 8.

Here are the latest updates from our team since the previous newsletter:

🪄️ Build outputs are now stored in a well-known location: _readthedocs/<format>. This opens up many new and exciting possibilities for generating and processing final output formats, which we will uncover in an upcoming blog post. PDFs for MkDocs and encrypted documentation are just two demos that we have ready. Stay tuned!

Happy 2023!

Here are the latest updates from our team since the previous newsletter:

This newsletter contains the first features and updates that have hatched since we announced a Q4 focus on core platform features in the previous newsletter.

Here are the latest updates from our team:

Here are the first features and updates that have hatched since we announced a Q4 focus on core platform features in the previous newsletter.

The latest updates from our team:

September was exciting because a few members of our team finally got to gather in person. Manuel, Benjamin, and Eric all attended Djangocon Europe in September, and had lots of great discussions around documentation.

Also, as we mentioned, in Q4 we’re going to be focusing on our core platform features. This means we’ll have fewer new features to talk about, but lots of smaller improvements to the overall experience of using Read the Docs.

Our focus for August has continued to be around marketing and community outreach. We continue to better understand how our customers view our product, and work with them to use it well.

We’re working to establish our goals for Q4 2022, and it looks like continued focus on polishing core platform features. We have a lot of features, and we need to continue making them easier to use.

We continue to be excited about the expanded capacity we have with an additional team member. Our focus for July has been around a lot of marketing and positioning, trying to better understand how our customers view our product, and work with them to use it well.

We also had our 12th birthday just before publishing this newsletter. 🎉

Summer has come, which means our overall development has slowed a bit as the team takes some well-deserved vacation time. That said, we’re still excited about our recent hire and the ongoing work we’ve been doing to support the documentation ecosystem.

Our focus for Q3 (July-Sept) of 2022 is around improving our frontend and marketing pages. This includes a fancy new marketing website, as well as a revamped dashboard UX that will make many features nicer for our users.

We’re excited to welcome Benjamin Balder Bach to our team, joining as a part-time contractor for now. He’s a developer with a history of working as an Open Source maintainer and event organizer in the Django community. He has also previously contributed to Read the Docs and will be a wonderful addition to the team.

We’re also excited to see people using our new build.jobs feature that we previously announced. There are a lot of interesting ways to adapt the build process with this, and we’ll continue to watch with interest how people are using it!

April has been another exciting month here at Read the Docs. We’ve gotten a few good candidates for our Product-focused Application Developer job posting, and we’re on to the second round of interviews. Expect to hear more about any new team members here in the next couple months.

We’ve continued building a number of features and bug fixes in our roadmap:

March has been a productive month for Read the Docs. We have finished our Product-focused Application Developer job posting, which we’re excited about. We plan to share this on a few job boards, and are looking for someone to join the team who is excited to work on our product.

We’ve continued building a number of features and bug fixes in our March roadmap:

It’s been pretty quiet on the company front in February, with nothing much to report. We’re actively working on our latest job description, which will be a product-focused Python development position. If you’re interested, please let us know.

In February we continued to work on refactors and internal changes. Among the major user-facing changes:

Welcome to the latest edition of our monthly newsletter, where we share the most relevant updates around Read the Docs, offer a summary of new features we shipped during the previous month, and share what we’ll be focusing on in the near future.

We have mostly finished migrating Read the Docs for Business users to Cloudflare for SSL. There are lots of interesting features this will enable, so stay tuned for updates there.

Welcome to the latest edition of our monthly newsletter, where we share the most relevant updates around Read the Docs, offer a summary of new features we shipped during the previous month, and share what we’ll be focusing on in the near future.

We are now managing custom domains for our corporate users using Cloudflare SSL for SaaS, which will remove the manual work that was needed on our side and make the process of setting up a custom domain almost instantaneous. It also will allow us to offer a CDN much easier in the future.

Welcome to the latest edition of our monthly newsletter, where we share the most relevant updates around Read the Docs, offer a summary of new features we shipped during the previous month, and share what we’ll be focusing on in the near future.

We successfully deployed mitigation measures against spam, and we are happy to report that the amount of abusive projects has dramatically decreased.

Welcome to the latest edition of our monthly newsletter, where we share the most relevant updates around Read the Docs, offer a summary of new features we shipped during the previous month, and share what we’ll be focusing on in the near future.

During the first week of November we attended the 2021 Essential Open Source Software for Science Annual Meeting, an event organized by the CZI Science team. We are thrilled to connect with projects in the Open Science ecosystem.

Welcome to the latest edition of our monthly newsletter, where we share the most relevant updates around Read the Docs, offer a summary of new features we shipped during the previous month, and share what we’ll be focusing on in the near future.

We have resumed sending our blog updates by email. You can subscribe to our newsletter so you don’t miss them.

Welcome to the latest edition of our monthly newsletter, where we share the most relevant updates around Read the Docs, offer a summary of new features we shipped during the previous month, and share what we’ll be focusing on in the near future.

We have published the first release candidate of version 1.0.0 of our Sphinx theme, which adds support for recent versions of Sphinx and docutils among other things, and announced our future plans for it. Check out the linked blog post to know more. Update: We have released 1.0 to PyPI

Welcome to the latest edition of our monthly newsletter, where we share the most relevant updates around Read the Docs, offer a summary of new features we shipped during the previous month, and share what we’ll be focusing on in the near future.

We have a new team member! Ana just joined us as Frontend Developer in the context of the CZI grant we were awarded to work on our JavaScript documentation embedding client and the Read the Docs redesign and UX.

Welcome to a new edition of our monthly newsletter, where we share the most relevant updates around Read the Docs, offer a summary of new features we shipped during the previous month, and share what we’ll be focusing on in the near future.

Eric presented the history of the company at the Upstream 2021 conference along with ideas for open source sustainability. You can read more about it in our recent blog post.

Welcome to a new edition of our monthly newsletter, where we openly share the most relevant updates around Read the Docs, offer a summary of new features we shipped during the previous month, and share what we’ll be focusing on in the near future.

We applied to the next round of the CZI Essential Open Source Software for Science! Our proposal is even more ambitious than the previous one, and we are excited about the possibilities for our users if we get accepted. The funding would cover 2 years of work, starting in 2022.

Welcome to a new edition of our monthly newsletter, where we openly share the most relevant updates around Read the Docs, offer a summary of new features we shipped during the previous month, and share what we’ll be focusing on in the near future.

The team keeps growing! Ra will join us next week to do account management for EthicalAds.

This is the first of our monthly newsletters, in which we would like to openly share with you the most relevant updates of Read the Docs, offer a summary of what new features we shipped to our users during the previous month, and share what things we will be focusing on in the near future.

We have a new colleague! Juan Luis will be working with us as Developer Advocate, with a focus on fulfilling the goals of the CZI grant we were awarded, improve our public facing documentation, and spread the word about our service.