Read the Docs newsletter - June 2022
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!
New features
We’ve continued building a number of features and bug fixes in our roadmap:
We have shipped a beta implementation of build.commands, which allows users to fully customize the commands run during builds. This enables support for other documentation tools, and we’re excited to see what you can do with it!
Static files are now served from documentation domains, instead of from assets.readthedocs.com. This allows them to be cached at the CDN with the same rules as all other version-specific files.
There is a nicer UI for cancelled builds now, which will show as the build status. This will make it more clear when a build failed or was cancelled for some reason.
We have shipped a new release of sphinx-hoverxref with better support for intersphinx content embedding.
We’ve shipped support for forced redirects in testing for now. This will allow users to configure redirects that happen when a page exists (200 response), which enables a bunch of neat use cases. Contact us if you want to try it out!
You can now specify build.tools.python: 3.11 for builds, which will install a beta version of Python 3.11. See more here: https://docs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/config-file/v2.html#build-tools-python
You can always see the latest changes to our platforms in our Read the Docs Changelog.
Upcoming features
We’re continuing to focus on outreach for our new build customization features, so that we can continue to improve them with your feedback.
Our work on improving redirects continues, as we know this is an important feature for many of our users.
We continue to focus on improving authentication on Read the Docs for Business. We are looking at implementing a two-step login process to simplify a lot of the user experience here.
Possible issues
We deprecated a feature flag around Mamba, which is now fully supported via the config file. Projects using Mamba with the old feature flag, and now removed, CONDA_USES_MAMBA, have to update their .readthedocs.yaml file to use build.tools.python: mambaforge-4.10.
We are still watching Sphinx upgrades for possible issues they might cause around the ecosystem.
Considering using Read the Docs for your next documentation project?
Check out our documentation to get started!
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