Antora: Documentation Sites for Software Teams by Dan Allen

Documentation is the facade of your software, its “curb appeal”. So you want to leave a good impression. But how do you create it? How do you version it? How do you publish it?

Despite there being countless site generators to choose from, few are well-suited for large-scale documentation sites, and none designed exclusively for AsciiDoc. Writers need the ability to create and manage documentation sites without needing deep knowledge of the web stack. Software teams need a workflow to collaborate on multiple versions of documentation that span departments. By creating Antora, we set out to fill these gaps. I'll explain how we architected Antora and how it changes the way we think about producing documentation.

Antora aggregates versioned content from a variety of repositories and branches that adhere to a standard project structure. It then converts that content and feeds it to a UI, which is provided by a separate software component. Out comes an offline-first site that can be published and viewed anywhere, even locally.

This talk will give you an understanding of how Antora enables software teams to effectively create, manage, and publish multi-version documentation sites.