The docs site is useful for developers who want to start building on Ocean Protocol. For now, that’s mostly people who want to start building data marketplaces, because marketplaces can now start building on Ocean Protocol.

Check out the other Trilobite Release videos.

The docs site is also about:

the Ocean Protocol software stack.

how to try some of the Ocean software.

ways you can contribute to Ocean Protocol. There is a page about that.

In the future, the docs will also help people who want to use Ocean Protocol for getting and managing data assets or data services.

The docs site isn’t about:

If you’re curious about the details of what’s in the new Ocean Protocol Documentation website, then the best way to find out is to go there: docs.oceanprotocol.com

Geek Stuff: How the Docs Are Built

We wanted a documentation system with a few key properties:

source files that can be edited using any text editor.

source files stored in (and read from) GitHub repositories, ideally in the same repositories as the code they document.

source files written using GitHub Flavored Markdown, or some minor variation of it.

using no proprietary software or standards.

generating a modern static website that gives us full control over styling (so we can follow the Ocean Protocol style guide).

Most of those requirements are so that Ocean Protocol developers can contribute to the documentation as part of their normal workflow, without having to learn any new tools or markup languages.

We ended up using GatsbyJS to build the docs website based on Markdown-ish files in the oceanprotocol/docs repository. That repository actually includes other repositories (such as oceanprotocol/dev-ocean) as Git submodules, so that files in other GitHub repositories look like local files. Travis CI automatically rebuilds the docs whenever a pull request is merged into the oceanprotocol/docs repository. The generated static site files actually live in Amazon S3 and are served via Cloudflare’s global content distribution network.

Note: I wrote “Markdown-ish” because we allow some extra, non-standard markup for special things, as described on the docs test page.

We’re happy with the results so far. It’s really easy to add new docs or edit existing docs, and the docs website itself has all the speed and style of the other Ocean Protocol websites.