Show HN: Corilla – Collaborative documentation for software teams
corilla.com
corilla.com
Corilla is a collaborative documentation tool for software teams. It solves the problems of a core workflow for writing, managing and publishing software documentation.
We're currently in the process of preparing version two of Corilla, so I thought I'd take some time to get some community feedback.
We do this by offering a hosted Markdown editor, saving to an internal repository of topics that are accessed by a novel "collections" mode. This lets you collect groups of topics in dynamic folders but tag/context/theme (the missing feature from Evernote or Google Docs), and publish as private internal or public HTML exports in seconds.
There's a whole host of workflow enhancements for technical writers, developer advocates, dev docs, etc. One I enjoy most days is the screenshot workflow - just copy and paste an image and Corilla takes care of the back end hustle (this used to be a mammoth task at Red Hat, now just as simple as copypasta directly into the UI and directly into a version controlled repo).
We also recently announced free docs hosting [0], so the full workflow from "as many writers on the same doc as you want" to "published to hosted docs service" in a few clicks. Again - I wish I had this at Red Hat.
The intention isn't to replace static docs or the "docs as code" movement, but to solve the problem we faced at Red Hat in enabling non-technical teams to... just write.
We're in use in over 85 countries now and starting work on a new version based on our incredible community feedback. Would love to hear your thoughts.
[0] https://medium.com/corilla-blog/corilla-hosts-your-documenta...
We took over 2/3 of Red Hat's global software documentation with our internal "just for us" tool in the first year of prototyping it. But ultimately we needed to learn a lot about the increasing focus on UX. Plus we learned that, surprise to nobody but us, writers just want to write.
You can see this trend with Dropbox acquiring Hackpad. Collaboration with attention to design workflow is very important. The ability for teams to create content easily is of utmost importance. As LEw Platt famously said:
> "If only HP knew what HP knows, we would be three times more productive."
Corilla's "Collections" module is like nothing else, and that's the real power of the product. Once you try it, there's no going back to "notes" or "documents"... and why would you? The ability to create content, and then grab it as a dynamic group as and if needed - plus push it to a private or publish HTML build in literally seconds? You can see why we've grown so fast.
Looping back around - I would caution investing too much time in tutorials without attention to UX and the design experience for the reader. Our buddy Eric over at Read The Docs is the default host for open source docs, where design matters less, and services like Udemy have raised the bar on LMS and tutorial experiences. Those to me are both extremes, and there's more LMS swarming every day.
IMHO the focus is on overall experience of managing information as a team, and I'd encourage others to join us in tackling this. That is, after all, where both the greatest problems and greatest budget are being directed.