MariaDB’s new unified documentation platform, at mariadb.com/docs/, centralizes all Knowledge Base and Enterprise Documentation onto a modern website. It offers a consistent look, streamlined navigation, AI-powered search, quickstart guides, version-specific tabs, and improved community contributions via GitHub.
For years, MariaDB users have navigated documentation that resided in various locations, primarily the MariaDB Knowledge Base and the dedicated MariaDB Enterprise documentation. While invaluable resources, their age showed, and we aimed for a unified, more intuitive and modern experience.
We are thrilled to announce a significant leap forward in how you access and utilize MariaDB’s official documentation. All MariaDB documentation is consolidated now and available on a brand-new, modern platform accessible at mariadb.com/docs/.
This move isn’t just a cosmetic change – it’s a fundamental reimagining of the documentation experience. We focused on delivering a documentation platform that helps you find the information you need, faster and more efficiently, with a vastly improved reading experience.
What’s New and Improved?
The new documentation platform introduces several key enhancements that will improve your experience:
- Modern Presentation and Consistent Experience: The first thing you’ll notice is the overall modern, cleaner, and more consistent presentation across all product documentation. It’s easier on the eye and provides a unified experience, whether you’re looking at MariaDB Server, MaxScale or Connectors.
- Streamlined Navigation for Effortless Discovery:
- Intuitive Sidebar Navigation: The new platform features a clear and consistent sidebar that allows for easy browsing through topics and sections, making it simpler to explore related content.
- On-Page Navigation: For longer, information-dense pages, a dedicated table of contents on the page sidebar ensures you can quickly jump to specific subsections without endless scrolling.
- AI-Driven Search: Find What You Need, Instantly:
- Our new documentation platform integrates an AI-driven search engine, prominently available on every page. This intelligent search understands your queries better, providing more accurate and relevant results.
- Quickstart Guides for Every Product:
- We’ve added dedicated quickstart guides to each product space, including MariaDB Server, MariaDB MaxScale, MariaDB ColumnStore, MariaDB Galera Cluster and MariaDB Connectors. These guides provide essential overviews of products, components, features, or specific tasks like installation and backup, getting you up and running faster.
- Future-Ready with Smart Tabbed Navigation:
- One of the most anticipated features, implemented on many pages already, is tabbed navigation. This solution will elegantly manage the differences between various product versions. It significantly reduces “clutter” on pages where version-specific details can make up large portions of the content. Most of this will be “hidden away” in intuitive tabs, ensuring a much smoother reading experience while still preserving essential details for older MariaDB versions. See this page for an example of how tabbed navigation looks like.
- Empowering Community Contributions:
- The new documentation is stored in GitHub, using Markdown as its source format. This makes it significantly easier for the vibrant MariaDB Community to contribute directly to the documentation, using pull requests and change suggestions, fostering a truly collaborative environment.
- Enhanced Feedback Mechanisms:
- Your feedback is invaluable, and we’ve made it easier than ever to provide it. For quick feedback on a specific page – like reporting typos, wrong information, or suggesting minor improvements – simply click on the smileys of the rating system available on each page and drop us a quick note. For more extensive feedback, direct discussions with the MariaDB documentation team and ongoing engagement, we also invite you to join our dedicated Slack channel. Find details on this page.
We are excited about this transition and believe it will significantly enhance how our community interacts with MariaDB’s wealth of knowledge. We encourage you to explore the new documentation platform and provide us with your valuable feedback as we continue to refine and expand this essential resource. As with any documentation migration of this size (more than 8000 pages!), there are quite a few rough edges left to smooth out, so stay tuned for more updates!
