For the past decade or more, perldoc.perl.org has been a useful and convenient resource for viewing perl documentation online. However, it has suffered from lack of maintenance and mounting unfixed issues over the past few years. Being familiar with the excellent Mojolicious documentation site and how it also can display core perldocs, I reasoned that such features would be simple to provide in this modern framework. And so, what would become perldoc.pl (thanks to a domain acquired by pink_mist) was born.

Based on (a now heavily customized fork of) Mojolicious::Plugin::PODRenderer, the basis of the site is simply rendering the perldocs available in various different perl installations. MetaCPAN::Pod::XHTML is used to provide similar rendering and linking features to metacpan, thanks to haarg. Using ideas from perldoc.perl.org, convenient features like being able to switch to the version of the current document in another perl, a function listing, and a search have been added, and I intend to add more and make tweaks as necessary while keeping the site simple in presentation.

My current ideas for additional features are: redirecting to the appropriate part of perlvar when a known special variable is entered in the search box; making the individual questions in the perlfaqs appear in search results; improving the mobile view of the site; and if it becomes needed, caching the rendered output of pages so they can be served faster. I am sure that the search will need lots of tweaking as well; I consider its present state a first draft. Let me know what you like or don't like, and what you want added, in the comments or the issue tracker.