The ARK team introduced the all new ARK Docs almost a month ago and the feedback has been outstanding. Through your input, we have identified several areas where we can improve our system. Today, we are proud to announce the move to a cleaner documentation “engine” that will make our resources easier to understand, read and navigate.

Our newest release of ARK Docs is now being generated with the help of VuePress (our team loves Vue). While our previous documentation was hosted on ReadMe.io, VuePress provides the major benefit of self-hosting, which removes the need to rely on a 3rd party to host our resources.

ARK Docs available at : https://docs.ark.io/

Why we switched from ReadMe.io?

Readme.io is a great platform that has a lot of positives. It is easy to modify the backend engine, it is easy to manage users, and the support is top tier. Unfortunately, we found the following shortcomings that made the platform less than ideal:

ReadMe is configurable, but still lacks some customizability where you need it the most (API documentation) and making it read and navigate better.

ReadMe wasn’t self-hosted and it was lagging / time-outing a lot when you need it the most to work (when editing documentation).

Reporting problems via ReadMe website is intuitive, but still we prefer for everyone to see what has been reported or changed via GitHub.

What we like about VuePress?

The switch from ReadMe to VuePress was fairly painless and allowed us to quickly make the transition. The following are some of the major benefits gained by making the transition:

VuePress & ReadMe both use Markdown to edit documentation so our documentation needed no additional translation in order to port.

All pages are statically generated so loading times are tenfold better and self-hosted so not relying on any middlemen.

Documentation is also hosted on GitHub and anyone can improve any page of the docs via GitHub pull-request (we like that a lot as its more transparent).

VuePress is much more configurable out of the box — from theming, to how you can build around API documentation. Our community developer Brian developed a nice “Execute” command so that you can see an example real-time output of the API call. A lot of the community also had problems reading API documentation with ReadMe and the lack of example calls so we provided example calls for each API call that is available (will be done with API v2 as well once that is live).

Overview of new Docs

We wanted a simple, easy to read, non-cluttered look which focuses on what is important — documentation.