An optional landing page

[christianavi]

I think it would be great to have an optional landing page as well. Could be just a Markdown. I am not sure though how it's gonna be implemented and what changes are required if this was to happen.

[geoffreymcgill]

Thanks for the feature request. This is functionality we have wanted for a long time and at some point we will be implementing. At the moment, you can create a custom /index.html page for your project home page, although you would 100% control the HTML.

You would need to remove your projects readme.md or index.md page in that scenario.

[rab-dev]

This is something I would really welcome as well.

Having landing page + docs + blog in one deploy would be great. But given experience with Docusaurus I'm concerned about the possible added complexity. How to support compelling landing pages using Markdown for tech-savvy non-devs ?

As a new user I was unaware of the index.html option (could be me). Perhaps until you resolve how to support landing pages this option could be made more obvious in the docs and/or use it on the retype site itself.

[geoffreymcgill]

But given experience with Docusaurus I'm concerned about the possible added complexity. How to support compelling landing pages using Markdown for tech-savvy non-devs ?

We would likely handle using the Page layout config. Maybe something as simple as layout: home. That could even be automated to some degree, where Retype would just treat the root readme.md or index.md file as the home page and automatically set the layout. Similar to how any pages within the /blog folder automatically get assigned the layout: blog layout.

Ideally we would develop several landing page options that you could switch between by just changing the layout value.

A few new components would be ideal too.

This is all on my list of features to implement. Just need more time, or funds to hire another engineer & designer.

But given experience with Docusaurus I'm concerned about the possible added complexity.

@rab-dev Can you explain this comment further? What has been your experience with Docusaurus? In general, from my perspective, they appear to be making a good product. Although, I have to admit, I've never actually implemented a full project using Docusaurus, so I've never been too deep.

Hope this helps.

[rab-dev]

It's not really about going deep with Docusaurus and more about wanting to stay shallow. Docusaurus supports MDX / JSX / React so you can do anything & get as fancy as you like. The results look great but it's over-complicated imo. I don't want to write code to write docs, I just want to write docs. When a product becomes bloated it becomes over-complicated for non-experts purely by them not being able to see the wood for the trees. You could argue just use a subset of Docusaurus but I say keep it simple in the first place if you can.

For landing pages you may be able to do something useful around markup for "sections". I've had simple 2-column sections before where the background color & column positions automatically alternated. Could be useful for landing pages.

Thanks for your help.

[geoffreymcgill]

@rab-dev Excellent feedback. Thanks for taking the time to respond.

It's not really about going deep with Docusaurus and more about wanting to stay shallow.
I don't want to write code to write docs, I just want to write docs.

Very well said, and I agree 100%.

[markbattistella]

@geoffreymcgill this would be great too with the new visibility levels too. Being able to set a landing page with login required, then access to the whole site would be nice for public sites but private information

[rab-dev]

I played with this and created a custom /index.html in the root src folder.

It raised a question about pathnames.

I would like option A, but I can only seem to get B or C with just retype.
I assume I could get D if I introduce an extra build tool / step.

Could be my limited understanding of retype but if anyone knows how to get Option A then we would have landing page + docs + blog from just retype (albeit with an externally created landing page).

	A	B	C	D
landing page	example.com	example.com	example.com/docs	example.com
docs	example.com/docs	example.com	example.com/docs	example.com/docs
blog	example.com/blog	example.com/blog	example.com/docs/blog	example.com/docs/blog

[geoffreymcgill]

Hi @rab-dev,

I was able to get option A working a couple different ways, although I'm not 100% sure if this covers your requirements.

Screen.Recording.2023-08-26.at.1.27.30.AM.mov

The above uses the route config to adjust the URLs. For example, using the following file structure:

Download .zip: home-sample.zip

Here are a few of the files from that sample:

/guides/index.yml

route: /docs/

/docs.md

---
order: 100
---
# Docs Home

Welcome to the documentation!

You could add a faq.md page into the root of the project and still maintain the /docs routing by using the following route config:

/faq.md

---
route: /docs/faq/
---
# FAQ

---

Another basic option would be to just add all the documentation pages into a /docs/ folder, then no route configs would be required. Although, the left tree-nav would show a root Docs folder.

Download .zip: home-sample-no-route.zip

---

Hope this helps.

[rab-dev]

Excellent!

Thank you for this. It is exactly the result I was looking for.

Attached is a simple extension to your solution showing how I have integrated my index.html into the mix.

I've actually used an index.md which then includes home.html so the regular retype navbar still appears on the homepage. And I modified some retype css settings to get a full-width homepage.

I admit it's a hack but it works for me.

Download home-docs-blog.zip