As many of you are aware, we’ve been working on updating and centralizing content that you all use to learn and develop on the Roblox platform. Earlier this summer we soft launched our Developer Hub (Dev Hub) to replace our old developer wiki, to provide a better experience and more resources within a centralized location. We re-enabled access to our old API pages on the wiki based on usability concerns that were posted after that soft launch and committed to improving that experience along with bringing the rest of the content over to the new Dev Hub.
You might have noticed we pushed a new update to the site which moved over the remaining sections including Education and the Creator Challenge, among others. In addition, we updated the API Reference section to reflect the comments and feedback you all provided. At this point, we have redirected virtually all traffic from the wiki to the new site, including the API Reference section.
We appreciate your feedback, patience, and support during this time as we worked to make the Developer Hub a great experience!
Great update considering mobile users could access some articles on the new domain from the old API reference as the search is still broken which we hope will be fixed soon!
I see a lot of the feedback from early on has been taken into account - collapsible sidebars, class tree on the API reference sidebar, code block theme persistence, function signatures shown, inherited properties and functions shown, etc.
Really appreciate seeing these changes. Dev hub looks fantastic.
Just want to let everyone else in the thread know that everyone on the IX team - myself included - will keep our ear to the ground with feedback and page fixes. You will be heard and listened to!
It’s a switch that you can toggle but it does nothing, what’s up with that?
I find the font and color that was chosen for the names and types a little hard to read sometimes in the API reference pages, but it’s an improvement over the previous version for sure.
Also, it seems like you still can’t click on the type label to go to the page of that type, this is a pretty highly needed feature for me personally.
Probably, my gut tells me it wouldn’t look consistent with the rest of the monospace font but we’ll see.
I recommend custom stylesheets for small things like this. I’ve found using the right content sidebar is faster when jumping to specific members on class pages.
I’m ok with giving up styling for functionality. I’m there to use the wiki, not appreciate the UI.
Also am I alone in thinking that all of this text is intimidating? Maybe having “Hide Content” be selected by default could be a lot friendlier to newer users.
Take a look at how much more naturally you look down the page when you don’t have 3 columns of text.
Not sure how easy it is to do this, but if the wiki could account for ultrawides that would actually be amazing. I know of quite a few devs (in fact entire roblox studios) that use ultrawides. My main beef is that to see the ‘CONTENT’ column (as pictured in picture #1 above) is squishing the interior stuff and extending the page length. If instead of pushing in it pushed out from the center text, that would be great.
I’d like to make a few suggestions to the dev portal:
Everything is too vertical. I liked the wiki’s layout where all the functions are listed nice and tightly and I only have to scroll down a little bit to view them all. That’s impossible with some items on the new portal. It took me 10 scrolls to get down to the events portion of the BasePart whereas it only took me one scroll on the wiki. As someone who browses the wiki a lot, this is a bit of a downgrade for me.
The “notreplicated” tag seems a little ambiguous and all over the place without much meaning from a first glance. Maybe we should hover over them and other tags to get more info?
The pages still feel really hard to read. Y’all need to find some way to better differentiate different kinds of information being displayed to make it easier to find what I’m looking for.
For instance, the spacing feels really uniform which despite the slightly darker background makes it really hard to distinguish between different items
Another thing that might help is to make the fonts not so similar between the description and technical information. The font size and shape appears to be the same, and the only difference is a few very subtle color changes. I would rather y’all make one more prominent (semi-bold / larger font size) than the other to create more obvious lines where one item begins and the other ends.
Also, finding a way better divide the technical information. The return value is basically equally prominent to the function/property/event name which is also basically equally prominent to the tags like [yields] which again makes the pages very hard to sort through.
The way I use these pages is I go through and read the names of the properties/functions/events in order to find something that has a name that sounds like what I want. Secondly, I read the description to then confirm whether it is useful to me or not, THEN I look for the parameters and the return value, and then the last thing I look for, if I even look for it, is information about whether it yields or is notreplicated.
I feel like just a little bit of typography would help organize this information to make it better work in a way that flows well with a human brain
I think it’d be useful to have flags next to properties/functions that are serveronly/pluginsecurity/etc… Especially when it comes to security, it is important to know that it’s there, but we can’t use it.
Wiki:
Developer Hub:
Especially people new to scripting just won’t understand why their script isn’t working, since most people won’t click the link to go to the actual property/function’s page and the Lua error isn’t that newb-friendly:
EDIT: As I just noticed from the screenshots, it’d be good for it to show the default values like the Wiki did (in this case, 4) - although that’s not that much of a priority for me personally.
Good catch - it seems that the most up-to-date version of that API member’s page wasn’t published. Do a hard refresh (CTRL+F5) and you should see the content. Let me know if you see a batch of pages that are the same way.
