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Improving the documentation user experience

featured releases community

Jan 31, 2025

Obinna Ekwuno
Julian Mills
Micha de Vries

Obinna Ekwuno, Julian Mills & Micha de Vries

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Improving the documentation user experience

At SurrealDB, we’re constantly iterating to enhance our product and provide the best possible experience for our users. Recently, we’ve gathered feedback through our channels and made updates we believe will improve both our documentation and your understanding of multi-model databases.

In this blog, we will be exploring these changes in more detail.

Improved documentation layout

We have modelled SurrealDB documentation as a multi-doc, which means it includes several points of entry, either through: SurrealDB, Surreal Cloud, Surrealist, SurrealML, SurrealQL, Tutorials, SDKs

The improved navigation is to ensure that you can always find information from wherever you are in the documents.

Documentation layout showing the new navigation structure

We’ve introduced a new expanded sidebar, allowing you to reference more information at a glance. We believe this will improve your documentation experience, and can’t wait to hear your feedback. In addition to this we have also improved search so you can find information much more easily. With that in mind, we have made the search faster including;

  • Added a new hotkey cmd + / or ctrl + / for windows to ensure that you can always search with ease.
  • Improved search indexing and display, ensuring your queries are returned with the most relevant pages across the multi-doc.

Search bar

Search modal

Data-model section

Whether you’re coming from a Document, Graph, Vector, or Time-series type database we’d like to help you build a better understanding of the ‘models’ needed to utilise and understand the capabilities of SurrealDB better. We’ve added a section that covers examples with popular databases such as MongoDB, Neo4J and Postgres.

Data-model section showing examples with popular data models

Improved getting started guides

We understand that there is a lot of information and it can be overwhelming to get started with our offerings. We’re here to guide you along the way with our getting started guides.

We look forward to your continued feedback that enables us to improve the user experience with our documentation.

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