September 2023 Summaries

Our Web Editor feature enables you to edit content directly on the web without needing an IDE, allowing for a live preview of your changes and instant validation of markdown code. We've created this experience using packages from our Dashboard and Mint, including React, Next.js, Tailwind CSS, remark, and rehype plugins. The new feature provides flexibility and convenience for developers, PMs, and technical writers to choose between the CLI and editor experience, ultimately enhancing their workflows.

Launch Week Day 5 unveiled the Web Editor, a new feature inspired by VS Code, which allows users to edit documentation directly in the browser without needing an IDE. This tool provides live preview functionality and instant markdown validation, enabling users to commit and push changes directly from the dashboard, offering a flexible alternative to CLI workflows. The Web Editor uses technologies like React, Next.js, Tailwind CSS, and various plugins to enhance user experience, ensuring that developers, project managers, and technical writers can choose their preferred mode of working. The editor is now available in beta, empowering users with more freedom and convenience in their documentation processes.

Our API Playground has been redesigned to offer a more powerful and user-friendly experience, with improved technical functionality and an enhanced UI/UX. The new design handles complex edge cases and provides expanded features, including multimedia response handling and more accessible input fields. With the upgrade, users can craft API requests directly within the browser without needing to write code or open a new window. The redesign is part of our mission to deliver the best docs-building platform, and it will be automatically applied to OpenAPI-hosted APIs on Mintlify.

Launch Week Day 4 introduced a comprehensive redesign of the API Playground, significantly enhancing its technical capabilities and UI/UX to establish it as a robust alternative to existing API request tools. The upgrade includes support for complex data types such as nested arrays and multimedia response handling, along with a more intuitive and accessible interface that allows users to craft and send API requests directly from their browser without additional coding. This redesign reflects the team's commitment to creating a powerful, user-friendly, and visually appealing documentation platform, addressing the complexities and limitations of previous solutions. With half of all active customers utilizing the API pages, the API Playground is a critical feature, and the revamp prioritizes long-term improvements over incremental changes. The updated platform is automatically rolled out for users hosting their API docs on Mintlify with OpenAPI, with plans to support APIs defined with MDX soon.

With the addition of Global CSS, users can now fully customize their documentation design, including setting global CSS for specific tags and creating reusable CSS classes. This feature is available on the business plan and enables fine-tuning of colors, formatting, and more. The goal of this feature is to make Mintlify docs adaptable and opinionated, allowing users to tailor the design to fit seamlessly into their brand and online presence. To get started, users can upgrade their CLI with `npm i -g mintlify@latest` and add a CSS file to their docs repository. Global CSS will be launched in beta with the Pro Plan, providing users with more control over their documentation design.

Launch Week Day 3 announced the introduction of Global CSS support, allowing users to fully customize the design of their documentation to align with their brand identity and online presence. Available on the business plan, this feature enables users to apply global CSS for specific tags and create reusable CSS classes, offering the ability to adjust everything from colors to formatting. This update was driven by user requests for more design flexibility, as previous customization options were limited to primary colors in the configuration file. With Global CSS, users can now tailor fonts, button border radiuses, and font colors to ensure their documentation seamlessly integrates with their brand. To access this feature, users can update their CLI and add a CSS file to their documentation repository, with Global CSS being launched in beta on the Pro Plan.

Docs Feedback is a new feature that allows users to provide feedback on documentation through simple upvote and downvote mechanics, enabling businesses to identify areas of improvement and boost customer success. By integrating this feature with analytics tools like Posthog, companies can gain valuable insights into user behavior and make data-driven decisions to enhance their documentation. The feature can be easily enabled by adding a configuration option to the mint.json file, allowing users to customize the experience and collect feedback on their documentation.

During Launch Week Day 2, a new feature called Docs Feedback was introduced, allowing users to provide direct feedback on documentation pages through a simple thumbs up/down rating system, which helps teams identify underperforming pages and content gaps. This feature integrates with analytics platforms like PostHog to track usage and user satisfaction, offering a streamlined method for gathering user feedback, which is crucial for improving documentation effectiveness and customer success. Mintlify utilizes PostHog for its analytics and suggests enabling this feature through a straightforward configuration in the mint.json file, allowing users to also suggest edits or raise issues directly on GitHub for public repositories. Docs Feedback is showcased at the bottom of all documentation pages, and Mintlify encourages engagement through their community and social media channels.

Today is Day 1 of our first ever Launch Week, where we're introducing improved CLI enhancements. The new CLI ships a prebuilt version of Mintlify ready to run in seconds and features a custom hot-reloading implementation for faster development. This results in a significant reduction in installation time and load times, with improvements ranging from 85% to 10 times faster than before.

Mintlify's first Launch Week introduced major enhancements to their Command Line Interface (CLI), significantly reducing its installation size by 90% and cutting setup time by over 95%, making the documentation-building process much more efficient for developers. The new prebuilt CLI, free from yarn dependencies, ensures faster hot-reloading and provides a seamless experience by packaging only necessary files, which reduces the CLI size from 1443MB to 152MB. These improvements allow changes to be automatically reflected in code upon Git push, enhancing the speed and efficiency of the development process by reducing first load and hot-reload times by up to 85% and 75% respectively. This optimization supports a more agile documentation workflow, enabling a smooth and powerful platform that is ready to run instantaneously.

Mintlify is a platform that transforms MDX files into beautiful documentation, including autogenerating API playgrounds, request and response samples, and more from OpenAPI specs. To get started, you need to generate your OpenAPI spec, create a Mintlify docs deployment, configure your OpenAPI in the docs, autogenerate your endpoints, and showcase your API. The process involves several steps, including installing the GitHub app, adding the OpenAPI spec to the root folder, configuring the API playground, and organizing the API endpoints in the sidebar. With Mintlify, you can create beautiful and SEO-optimized API documentation quickly and easily.

This tutorial offers a comprehensive guide on using Mintlify to autogenerate API documentation from OpenAPI specifications, detailing steps from spec generation to deployment. It highlights the process of configuring OpenAPI within documentation, utilizing Mintlify's scraper to create endpoint MDX files, and organizing API endpoints in the documentation sidebar for an enhanced user experience. Mintlify, a documentation platform, facilitates the transformation of MDX files into visually appealing documentation and automatically generates API playgrounds along with request and response samples from OpenAPI specs. The guide emphasizes the ease of setting up a Mintlify deployment, integrating OpenAPI specs into the docs, and using Mintlify's scraper for rapid generation of endpoint documentation, ultimately showcasing the API in a structured and user-friendly manner.