Skip to content

buzzfeed/slate

 
 

Repository files navigation

Buzzfeed Slate

Screenshot of Example Documentation created with Slate

The example above was created with Slate. Check it out at tripit.github.io/slate.

Features

  • Clean, intuitive design — with Slate, the description of your API is on the left side of your documentation, and all the code examples are on the right side. Inspired by Stripe's and Paypal's API docs. Slate is responsive, so it looks great on tablets, phones, and even print.

  • Everything on a single page — gone are the days where your users had to search through a million pages to find what they wanted. Slate puts the entire documentation on a single page. We haven't sacrificed linkability, though. As you scroll, your browser's hash will update to the nearest header, so linking to a particular point in the documentation is still natural and easy.

  • Slate is just Markdown — when you write docs with Slate, you're just writing Markdown, which makes it simple to edit and understand. Everything is written in Markdown — even the code samples are just Markdown code blocks!

  • Write code samples in multiple languages — if your API has bindings in multiple programming languages, you easily put in tabs to switch between them. In your document, you'll distinguish different languages by specifying the language name at the top of each code block, just like with Github Flavored Markdown!

  • Out-of-the-box syntax highlighting for almost 60 languages, no configuration required.

  • Automatic, smoothly scrolling table of contents on the far left of the page. As you scroll, it displays your current position in the document. It's fast, too. We're using Slate at TripIt to build documentation for our new API, where our table of contents has over 180 entries. We've made sure that the performance remains excellent, even for larger documents.

Getting Started with Slate

Prerequisites

You're going to need:

  • Linux or OS X — Windows may work, but is unsupported.
  • Ruby, version 1.9.3 or newer
  • Bundler — If Ruby is already installed, but the bundle command doesn't work, just run gem install bundler in a terminal.

Getting Set Up

  1. Fork this repository on Github.
  2. Clone your forked repository (not our original one) to your hard drive with git clone https://github.com/YOURUSERNAME/slate.git
  3. cd slate
  4. Install all dependencies: bundle install
  5. Start the test server: bundle exec middleman server

You can now see the docs at http://localhost:4567. Whoa! That was fast!

Now that Slate is all set up your machine, you'll probably want to learn more about editing Slate markdown, or how to publish your docs.

Examples of Buzzfeed Slate in the Wild

TODO

  • add some solid

About

Beautiful static documentation for your API

Resources

Contributing

Stars

Watchers

Forks

Packages

 
 
 

Contributors

Languages

  • JavaScript 77.3%
  • CSS 17.3%
  • Ruby 2.8%
  • HTML 2.6%