New Leaf Documentation

[mychidarko]

This is a complete redo of the existing documentation made to address a couple of issues:

• Fix problems with current documentation

  • Difficulty navigating
  • Scattered content
  • Older features still present

• Keeping up with changes since 3.0

  • Deprecation of Skeleton
  • Merge of Leaf MVC and Leaf API
  • Merge of Router into Leaf Core

• Drive a new focus on the beginner experience

• Highlight the community and some of our new processes

• Make the documentation more maintainable

• Prioritizing the functional mode API, so you will see a lot more of:

  app()->get(...);
  
  app()->run();

  Instead of:

  $app = new Leaf\App();
  
  $app->get(...);
  
  $app->run();

• Additionally, this rewrite explains more concepts in depth, going into some details about implementation and other ways you can creatively use some Leaf features.

• Adds more focus on supporting material for the documentation which includes images, videos and illustrations. We want to make the documentation the single source of truth, but have a ton of supporting material that builds on what is found in the new documentation.

The rundown

The new documentation doesn't spare any effort in breaking down complex architectural problems and existing PHP features. We treat every concept as a new one and explain in that fashion.

• Accessible to people of all levels
• Explains both Leaf and PHP concepts as if everyone is a beginner
• Interactive examples via the sandbox (not yet implemented)
• Use of more illustrations, images and videos

When complete, this will completely replace our existing docs. We'll move the current documentation to our documentation archive so it will still be available. The new documentation is currently available at beta.leafphp.dev but will move to the main domain once completed.

This PR will also remain open for your comments, you can always add a new comment for your ideas, issues you notice or just random discussions regarding the documentation.

What to expect

We are aiming to have the new documentation done by the end of October 2024, although a few things like the tutorial, API reference and codelabs will take longer than that (possibly November or December 2024).

We have already completed the design phase and have started building out some static pages. We will be sharing some early updated documentation pages with the community for feedback. We hope to have a continuous feedback loop with the community, so please don't hold back if you have any feedback for us.

Note that this documentation also has some new API changes that have not yet been implemented so be careful.

Thanks,
The Leaf Team ❤️