In this blog post, I would like to talk about the improvements in documentation navigation you can see in the Qt Framework's documentation for the Qt 6.9 release.
Previously, our documentation portal relied mostly on searching: you type a request and get the results. This works well if you know how the things are named in the Qt world. But if you switch to Qt from a different platform, how do you know what to enter in the search box? What if you want to explore the features of a particular module? In this case, you need to have better navigation in Qt docs.
Navigation in the Qt Creator help viewer
In Qt 6.9, we reorganized the documentation structure for each module in Qt Creator's help viewer.
In the Qt Creator's help viewer, you can find all the topics we have for each module organized in a tree structure.
Navigation in online docs for Qt 6.9
We added a common navigation tree for the entire Qt Framework to our online docs.
This tree includes module docs as subtrees. The essential modules, like Qt Core, Qt GUI, or Qt Quick, are placed on the first level of the tree. The module subtree may include docs for other relevant modules. For example, the Qt Quick subtree contains other Qt Quick related modules:
In the Modules subtree, you can find all the add-ons shipped with Qt Installer.
We'd love to hear your feedback
To be honest, the job is not done yet. Now, we are in a situation where we added a tree to a huge documentation set that never had this kind of navigation. The new navigation tree brought us new capabilities and new challenges, too. Now, we should write the docs with the new navigation in mind.
If you notice that the topic tree can be improved or the content relative to the tree can be optimized, please create a ticket at bugreports.qt.io for the Documentation component and describe in detail how we can improve our navigation or content.
