Announcing the new Developer Hub

@Maximum_ADHD

I think the API directory sidebar and the table of contents may take up space when not needed. A button to hide either one of them would work out better, and when its hidden, the content of the page should wrap itself to fill in the empty spaces.

That way, it could resolve the issue of some people who gave feedback on how the new layout has narrow reading space. Perhaps it could also be a default setting.

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Okay actually let me retract a lot of this - there are still a lot of problems with this, but the new site definitely has a lot of potential and the design is much more professional, just some of the issues with reduced information being displayed and the eye strain required to get resources bugs me, but thank you to the team who developed this :slight_smile:

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Love the new aesthetic.

now if only the site could teach me how to code well ā€¦

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Iā€™m of the same sentiment that this should be a subdomain of Roblox. Itā€™s extremely un-intuitive and makes the site look sketchy. Branching out the number of off-site domains will just make phishing scams easier because now not only do people have to watch out for false .roblox urls, but now this website.

Also, this new layout has absolutely given me a harder time deciphering information.

For example, yesterday I was looking at documentation for PathfindingService.
http://robloxdev.com/api-reference/class/PathfindingService

Not only was there a huge block of text that frankly I didnā€™t care about, but when I went down to look for what I needed (FindPathAsync) I was told this function returns an Instance (clicking it redirects to the generic instance object). Stuff like this should be more specific if there is an object in particular this thing returns. I want to know what FindPathAsync returns (The Path object) and read documentation on it. The only time the path function is referenced is in the big block of text that I didnā€™t bother reading until the third time I went looking for a reference, the path object should be mentioned in the table that contains all the information. I should not have to read a ton of unnecessary information or pick out specific words from blocks of text. This makes my workflow unnecessarily complicated when Iā€™m already privy to what a lot of it means. Iā€™m sure there are better examples of this out there, but this in particular was something that I ran into.

I should also mention that even on the findpathasync function itself, the path object is still hidden in a huge block of text and the api table still only says it returns an Instance. This is a little better though because this time the api table description says it returns a ā€˜Pathā€™ (which I canā€™t click on).

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The documentation page for BasePart.Anchored references BasePart.touched, which is deprecated. Should refer to uppercase BasePart.Touched.

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Came to a point where I needed to reference String Pattern details so I went looking to the wiki for it. Got redirected to the robloxdev.com. Ok, Iā€™ll search for it there. Tried multiple searches and looked everywhere for information I needed. Couldnā€™t find it. So I manually went back to the old wiki where I knew I could find the information I needed. Found the page, apparently it doesnā€™t exist anymore. I even have a direct link to it, but I get told that the content is no longer available.

This is the direct link
wiki.roblox.com/index.php?title=String_pattern

So not only can I not find information I need on the new hub, but itā€™s been removed from the old wiki. So it looks like Iā€™m using external documentation on Lua to find what I need.

Edit: Was able to use the handy dandy waybackmachine to find the article on the old wiki.
https://web.archive.org/web/20170609121644/wiki.roblox.com/index.php?title=String_pattern

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Fixed :slight_smile:

Another thing I miss is the hierarchy of classes which let you easily see the inheritance of each class

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This is imperative for my work, as I often need to target the parent class in favour of creating exceptions for each individual class.

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Definitely would like to be able to use the old site again rather than this one until things are fixed and more polished. Thereā€™s just a lot of things, which have been mentioned before, that need to be resolved in order for us to have a better experience using the page.

Other than that, I feel that this was a pretty okay update. And also, some articles/pages still lead to the old site and donā€™t redirect to the new one. Things such as the Creator Challenge, Remote Functions & Events page. Those are just two of what Iā€™ve found so far. Hope to see this get improved in the coming weeks. :wink:

Edit: Nevermind about some of the pages not being redirected. Didnā€™t know they would still be on the old site if you Google searched it.

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Hey folks

Thanks everyone for taking the time to give us your feedback on the new DevHub. Itā€™s clear from your feedback there are lots of issues and in particular in the API reference section which many of you depend on regularly. We agree also that it would have been valuable to have solicited community feedback on the design before pushing this out. For these reasons we are taking your suggestion to re-enable our API reference section on the wiki while we work through this. You can now visit the old API pages by going to: https://wiki.roblox.com/index.php?title=API:Class. Articles and tutorials will still redirect to the new site, but API pages will not if you are still on wiki.roblox.com.

We really appreciate your patience in the meantime and appreciate any ongoing feedback you would like to share about the new DevHub which weā€™ll keep up and available. I also want to take a moment to thank CloneTrooper for responding to your questions and feedback post launch. Heā€™s been a great advocate internally for your needs. Weā€™ll keep you posted as we continue to iterate on the new DevHub.

-BaubleBI

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Oh thank heaven

@UristMcSparks Hi,

There's a grammar error on this page

Nothing major, but just a heads up!

Thanks! Iā€™m glad you guys care about what the community values. Itā€™s unfortunately hard to find that on other platforms. Excited to see what the next iteration of the new site looks like!

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Amazing, thanks for making this change. Hopefully the revised variant of the developer hub will not have such issues.

Thanks! Fixed.

Thankyou! This is great and I really hope the current issues can be fixed because the new website is really nice aside from a few small things.

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Thanks a ton!

I do hope that the API docs can be sorted out. Iā€™ll be sure to give some insight so that we can get this newer feature rolled out, because it most certainly has promise.

I came up with a way I think would be ideal for displaying the classtype browser. It would be a hybrid of both the system we had beforehand and the new system.

I created an image to depict this idea, as it may be easier to explain or understand through this.

Click here to view the image

Itā€™s not perfect, but it certainly gets an idea across. The goal is to at least point towards a potential change.

While there are definitely some benefits to this change, there are many downsides.

It should be said that this change seems a lot more beneficial to the newer developer, but in the long run affects the more experienced developer due to varying issues. Many things which made navigation, usage, and understanding easier were provided on the old wiki, compared to how everything is ridiculously spread out now that finding and using things are such a pain that I cannot picture myself using this new system as much as Iā€™ve used the old system,

As many others have said:

  • There is so much empty space
  • The pages are narrower
  • The lack of Instance icons
  • No parameters at the top
  • The domain is not connected to the official roblox website, but rather a sketchy website with a completely new domain

The list goes on and onā€¦ but here are a few things that I personally thought were done poorly:


Parameters

This new website has an awful usage of functions and things of the like which used to have parameters shown with them, but now only have a single function name. While it could be said that they have setup a bad system, they have, in fact, setup an amazing systemā€¦ just somewhere else.

Almost everywhere with the new hub you will be shown something like this:

But somewhere else in the same hub you can get something like this:

The second is far better than the first, providing parameters, and also creating very little white or empty space.


Font and Coloring

In the hub, the usage of fonts and coloring in one specific area is just horribleā€¦ Iā€™m talking about the code blocks. The font on the code blocks is nearly impossible to read, a lot of the text can be misread, for example an O could be seen as a 0, and some of the letters seem as though they overlap other letters.

What can also be seen here is a lime green font on a white background, this is nearly impossible to read without either zooming, squinting, or killing your eyes in the process.


With all of this being said, it is important to note that there are far more issues which can be found in other membersā€™ posts. Overall, this change seems to be more for getting newer players into developing.

Lastly, there does not seem to be a direct link to this new hub on the website, and we cannot even type out the new websiteā€™s link without it being filtered.

EDIT: I did not notice an update about how the API is in the process of being changed, but I will still leave this here as my feedback on this new change. And is the domain for real, or is it in the process of being moved to the official Roblox domain so that it doesnā€™t seem so much like a fake website?

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