Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

I'm incredibly surprised by this. I personally use the Phoenix documentation as the gold standard for good developer documentation!

There is an excellent, clear and practical set of guides that take you through the increasing complexity of a Phoenix app. I find them very clear, and surprisingly complete. They start here: https://hexdocs.pm/phoenix/up_and_running.html

The 'reference level' documentation is also excellent. I picked this example randomly, but it has an extensive guide at the top and then good description of each of the functions: https://hexdocs.pm/phoenix/Phoenix.Channel.html




I think what Phoenix is missing is a way to search all of the included packages from one place. The one thing I struggle with is having to figure out what module a function is in so I can find the docs for it.

As a Developer I don’t necessarily think I should have to bounce around between docs for Phoenix, Phoenix.HTML, Phoenix.PubSub etc. The docs can be separate for sure but at least give me a single central search for them.


I agree this is a pain and we have an open issue in ExDoc (#1551) to tackle this.

If anyone is interested in submitting a PR, it will be very appreciated!


Thanks Jose! I know writing docs/guides is really hard and 1st class search can make a huge difference. Another thing I love about the Laravel docs, is searching via a keyword that I know may exist on a specific page; the list of available methods on a `Collection` is one I use all of the time.

I see in the Github issue you specifically call out _not_ searching text content from related modules, but I think if you can make it performant, it's worth the extra effort to allow full text search. I suppose the harder part might be ranking if you're not using a system that is built for that use case, but I think it would be helpful.




Join us for AI Startup School this June 16-17 in San Francisco!

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: