jhDocs and jackhenry.dev

jhDocs was originally created as a self-service documentation tool for teams that author content for the developer documentation in jackhenry.dev, our portal for third-party developers who write to the Jack Henry platform.

We sometimes call our jackhenry.dev documentation the “dot dev docuverse”, consisting of several standalone static documentation sites. We’ve designed the user experience for the dot dev docuverse to help it feel like a single website for our users, while in reality it consists of multiple federated sites, each with its own GitHub repo and potentially its own separate team maintaining it.

We use common UI elements across all of these sites to maintain the illusion of one site, including:

• Global navigation via a hamburger menu in the header
• Ability to access the developer portal via buttons in the header
• A federated keyword search / AI Assist feature, via the search box in the header

This approach provides us with the best of both worlds… each doc site can be maintained by its own separate team, with jhDocs acting as the glue that binds these sites together as a cohesive single user experience for our users.

But as we developed jhDocs, we saw that it could be useful for all Jack Henry teams who need a self-service documentation site, whether it’s part of jackhenry.dev or not. While these sites can enjoy all of the useful features in jhDocs, they don’t need some of the UI elements that are specific to jackhenry.dev.

Each jhDocs site has a configuration setting (the dotDevSite param in config.yaml) that identifies it as a dot dev site or not. Sites that specify a value of true for this setting will see these extra jackhenry.dev-specific UI elements, including:

• A hamburger button at the top-left of the header bar that displays the global navigation, offering links to all of the dot dev docuverse sites
• “Sign in” and “Sign up” buttons at the top-right of the header bar, which allow devs to log in to the Jack Henry developer portal
• A “jackhenry.dev” link at the top of all breadcrumbs.

All of these elements help reinforce the illusion that this collection of federated sites is a single website, with a unified, cohesive user experience.

Sites that are not part of the dot dev docuverse will not see these elements, as they might confuse users who aren’t expecting to see them in that site.

So everyone is welcome to use jhDocs for their self-service documentation needs, whether you’re writing for jackhenry.dev or not!