Better Offline & Development User Experience

[edsiper]

We are long-time Gitbook users at docs.fluentd.org and docs.fluentbit.io. While at the beginning the experience was smooth to work in local mode or offline, now it is no longer possible. As paid users, we would love to have an improved experience for developers.

As open-source projects, our repos receive contributions where the authors cannot test their changes without access to Gitbook without an account. From the other side, as project maintainers, we don't want to log into Gitbook to preview the changes proposed, this makes the CI hok not that useful. This slows us down and doesn't reduce friction from a contributor/user experience.

When we heard Gitbook was going back to OSS root it was great news, however, we got the wrong expectations and it seems we cannot do what we used to do in the beginning with the client or the old desktop tools.

What do we need ?

• local previews of content being modified
• offline mode
• Github CI preview that doesn't require a Gitbook account

Is this something is going to be fixed and if so is there any ETA ?,

Sadly community is pushing to move to other solutions with friendly dev/community cycle,. We just need to understand the plans around it so we can take the right call moving forward.

Thanks again for your help.

[addisonschultz]

Thanks for the context @edsiper - We're keeping an eye on this area as we build out more features/GitBook for teams like yours.

I'm curious for a little more context - it sounds like you're making a lot of edits locally (in a code editor). Would a lightweight solution to view the content in a "structured" way be sufficient enough (something like https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/languages/markdown#_extending-the-markdown-preview)? Or would you require something as close as possible to the published version?

[edsiper]

@addisonschultz we need something that our community can deploy locally for testing, kind of hugo, jekyll and so on. While we can have contributors adding new markdown files, those won't have the special features available in Gitbook editor, also if they miss to update SUMMARY.md we won't see the problem until is deployed.

[addisonschultz]

Thanks for the context @edsiper - we've got it logged on our side. I'd love for us to revisit this area as well so we can make it a lot more smooth. If you have any other ideas or requests for the offline editing experience, feel free to add it here 👍

[fabianhug]

Any updates here? Local development is a pain tbh. I want to use my local tools, preview and push the changes. Using the editor slows us down.

[addisonschultz]

@fabianhug Not as of now - but this is a great place to leave us any feedback on specific points you’d like to see. Things like previewing your changes specifically, tighter integrations from GitHub <> GitBook - can you let us know what pieces or workflows you’d be specifically interested in using?