A couple of weeks ago at CukenFest, we launched a brand-new documentation site for Cucumber.

Documentation for open-source projects is one of those things that can easily languish in the important but never urgent pile. We realised about a year ago that Cucumber's documentation, which was scrappy and poorly maintained, was a barrier to entry for many new users.

We want Cucumber to be a welcoming and inclusive experience for everyone, so this needed to change.

We set some money aside to hire Samuel Wright, a professional documentation author to work part-time to drive the project forward. Aslak built a new platform using hugo and netlify to migrate all the documentation onto, and the work began.

It's been a mammoth, painstaking task, going through old wiki pages, previous versions of the docs, and pulling all of that together into something coherent. An additional challenge is the number of languages Cucumber supports. When we write a tutorial, it needs to make sense in at least Java, JavaScript and Ruby. This means the authoring team need input from people with all those language skills.

The community have rallied around the project, particularly Marit van Dijk who has been instrumental in writing new content and recycling the old stuff. We owe a massive 🌈❤️💐 to Marit, Sam, Aslak and everyone else who has contributed to this.

Some links may have broken, sorry

In the end, we took the decision that trying to route all old URLs for the documentation would not be worth the effort, and that it was better to get the new site out there as the authoratative source. The old wiki is closed for edits but still stands for now. We'll be replacing each page with signposts to the relevant place on the new site over the next few weeks.

We'd love your help

We'd love your feedback on the new docs, and if you have time, your help in authoring more content. You can find the docs team in Slack here - you'll need to sign up here to get in.