Orchid

Build and deploy documentation sites that grow with you

7 followers

Build and deploy documentation sites that grow with you

7 followers

Orchid is a framework for generating project documentation websites, with all the bells-and-thistles you need to go with it. Orchid lets you publish your all wikis, changelogs, blogs, code comments, and more with one centralized workflow.

Launch tags:Developer Tools

Launch Team

Figr AI: UX Agent for Product Teams — Learns your product. Thinks through UX

Learns your product. Thinks through UX

Promoted

Nice one, what distinguishes you from GitBook for example?

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6yr ago

@cedrik_dudek I'm interested in the answer too :) I checked the theme design offered on the theme page and all of them feel very heavy and difficult to enter for customizing... unless it's actually shipped out with lightweight skeleton-like feel. I'd hear from developers input :D

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6yr ago

Orchid

Maker

@cedrik_dudek @satanicha_ An older version of GitBook allowed one to self-host their website. You run their CLI and get a static website you can host or archive anywhere. They have since deprecated that tool to only host sites as a service, and Orchid is an ideal replacement for those still wanting a self-hosted site. In addition, GitBook is just a wiki. If you want to maintain a project blog, have non-documentation pages (marketing landing pages, for example), or publish generated code documentation, you'll need to look elsewhere. Orchid brings all these together into a single site so you don't need to fight trying to get multiple tools working together.

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6yr ago

Orchid

Maker

@satanicha_ The available themes are fairly barebones, and customization is typically done by overriding templates. Themes are modular, and individual components or theme areas can be easily customized as needed. For simple sites, you shouldn't need to customize the theme itself as much as you want to customize menus and components, which get embedded into the theme.

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6yr ago

Just a suggestion by a sr. designer from how I see it — while design is pretty big big part of your marketing campaign or slogan for this product, I would recommend replacing those illustrations you have on the front page, which everybody have seen, recognized, or used the same illustration (not to mention, it's in the still original color!) just in sake to make your marketing point stronger in design area... (If anyone got confused reading this, these illustrations seen on the homepage (while writing this post) are one of the most popular and widely used illustrations everywhere for various different products provided for free by a generous illustrator alongside with hundreds and hundreds of similar illustrations)

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6yr ago

Orchid

Maker

@satanicha_ I am aware of how common these illustrations are. But I do not have the budget to hire a proper designer and I'm not a designer myself, so they're better than having no illustrations at all! And I did customize the colors, it's just that Orchid's purple is close to the default blue.

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6yr ago

Orchid

Maker

Hey everyone! 👋 My name is Casey, and two years ago I started work on Orchid with a simple, yet profound vision: to make it easy to publish documentation websites, especially ones with source-code docs like Javadoc. Typically, you'd have your build tool generate source code docs, then copy that to a folder where another tool published a site with your wiki. Yet another tool would handle your blog, and then you'd still have to figure out how to get all these sites linked together (hoping you aren't left with any broken links!), and get it deployed somewhere like GitHub pages. This process is so painful, so I decided to do something about it. Fast-forward two years, and Orchid now supports source-code documentation for 5 languages, deploys your site to 4 different hosting providers, has a robust and mature component-based theming system, and utilizes a unique approach to managing shared configurations that only gets easier to use as your site grows in scale. And today's release represents nearly 6 months of work refactoring, testing, documenting, redesigning, and refocusing my efforts on why I built Orchid in the first place: to publish really great documentation websites. Be sure to check out the redesigned homepage, as well as the 0.18.0 release announcement! 🏡 Homepage - https://orchid.run/ 📣 Release Announcement - https://orchid.run/news/2019/12/... Orchid is completely free and open-source, and I rely on feedback from the community to shape its future. I'd appreciate any comments or feature-requests, and would love to answer any questions you may have!

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6yr ago

What made you decide to write in Java instead of other languages like Go, PHP or JavaScript?

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6yr ago

Orchid

Maker

@james_lei There are several reasons, and not just because I greatly prefer the strong typing of Java to other more dynamically-typed languages. Though that is a big reason 😜 1) the JVM is a really great platform to build on. It's incredibly stable, runs anywhere without having to build separate binaries, and has pretty good runtime performance. 2) The JVM is really great for integration with a wide variety of tools and languages. Integration with Asciidoctor is possible because of JRuby 💎, and Pygments syntax highlighting works because of Jython 🐍. These are just a couple examples, but JNI and Graal open up even more possibilities for integrating with other languages if needed. 3) Java has a huge ecosystem with many rock-solid, stable, and widely-adopted libraries available. 4) The initial idea of Orchid was to integrate Jekyll with Javadoc, which is written in Java. The first versions of Orchid ran directly inside the Javadoc process, though this is no longer the case. 5) Lastly, I'm primarily an Android developer for my day-job, and so I do just really like working in Java and Kotlin. And as a bonus, as I work to convert the entire thing to Kotlin, it's not out of the realm of possibility to one day have Orchid able to run in NodeJS or as a native binary like Go. Highly unlikely, but Kotlin's multiplatform capabilities make this possible, unlike other languages.

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6yr ago

ProductHunt reply function is buggy. That make sense for Android developer, I had planning to develop Go for multiple platforms including Go mobile and embedded devices. Good luck to your project!

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6yr ago

Keza

This is solid - great work

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6yr ago