Ellis Lab User Guide

No but I forget what they use.

How strange. They don’t use their own software on their own website?

The main page of the product is advertised as this: Can ExpressionEngine Do That?

It does not seem like something very complicated to do. I’m really curious why they went with another software instead.

Website, yes.

User guide, no.

I believe it had to do with the User Guide being tied to a specific version of the software which was always in flux and had to launch with the release of a new version of the software.

Look - the EL folks are a reasonable, rational, intelligent bunch of people. Of course they’d want to use their own stuff if it made sense. Get their reasons for the implementation before jumping to judge them.

I’m not judging, but it would be like WordPress using Drupal for their own website.

Would you sell a product not even you use? What ever the reasons are, it does not give a very good impression. Its like a hosting company using another hosting provider for their own website. If they don’t trust their own service, how can they sell it to others.

Of course there can be complicated technical reasons, but documentation does not seems something very complex to do with Expression Engine. I’m curious because I wanted to do something similar with EE but now that you say its not even build with EE I assume it would be too complicated to replicate something similar.

EE powers the main EllisLab.com marketing website so claims of “they don’t use what they sell” aren’t true. EL have never claimed EE was a perfect fit for every need on the web.

I’d rather see a company be pragmatic about their tool and use it where it’s appropriate rather than be dogmatic and force-fit it where it ultimately slows them down in other efforts.

EE doesn’t natively allow you to “stage up” number of changes to multiple entries currently live on the web and then roll all of those changes live simultaneously.

That’s the complexity that the User Guide has that the marketing website does not.

Looking at http://builtwith.com/?https://ellislab.com/expressionengine/user-guide/ it lists EE - so possibly I’m wrong and this has changed, or maybe the docs are wrapped with EE, etc. I know it’s been a few years since this question asked.

Well, if its made with EE, I would be really interested, to me it looks like EE, even the comment sections.

I currently use the Wiki module for documentation so multiple users can edit it and it works nice. A bit basic but works for text docs.

OK - previous employee says the docs are maintained in http://sphinx-doc.org/

Another requirement was to generate a PDF of the docs which this tool does.

Thanks, I guess that is one requirement, actually initially I used something similar because I also had the need for different outputs, including PDF, Windows HTML manual output and ePub (its user documentation after all).

It seems that software actually does all that.

That makes sense. I don’t think there are modules today that can output to different formats and maintain the structure as it was one big manual with sections.