Search result breadcrumbs, better variant + language support and more

4 November: Breadcrumbs in search results, better support for languages and versions on the same docs site, a new comments popover panel and plenty of other improvements and bug fixes

Breadcrumbs in search results

If your site is complex — with a lot of sections or variants — sometimes it’s hard to know if search is taking your users to precisely the page they need.

To make it easier for your users to be confident about choosing a result, we’ve added breadcrumbs to search results. Now they won’t just see the page title and relevant text from the page — they’ll also see the site section, variant, and page group that it lives inside.

Search will show a maximum of three breadcrumbs — if there are more, it’ll just show the first, second and last breadcrumb, with a … truncating the space between.

If a site has translation variants, those will not be listed in the breadcrumbs — as the user is already browsing in their preferred language, they don’t need to see the language in the breadcrumbs.

Better variant support for versions and languages

If you document multiple versions of your product and also want to offer localized versions of those docs with variants, you can now do that in GitBook — as docs sites now support both translation variants and version variants at the same time.

GitBook will automatically recognize these different variant types and show a version dropdown at the top of the sidebar, a translation dropdown in the header — or both.

This docs site includes both a language selector (top right) and a version variant drop-down (left) allowing you to host both languages and versions simultaneously.

When there are multiple variants in the same language, GitBook shows each of those languages in the translation dropdown in the header.

Then, the variant picker in the left sidebar will show all the variants available in that language — with the first variant opening by default when you choose a language.

Read and add comments without opening a side panel

Adding a comment or reading comment threads will no longer open the entire comments side panel by default. You can now add and review comments using a new popover menu.

That means you can more easily add comments right alongside the content you’re editing, and check threads right in context.

And if you want to review all the comments on a page or just prefer using the side panel for feedback? You can still access it from the Comments menu in the header bar.

Improved

• We’ve updated the palette you use to add inline links in your docs. You can still copy, edit and remove links using the palette, but when you edit the link you can now also edit the text that is linked from the palette.

• Talking of palette improvements, we’ve made similar improvements to the annotations palette. When you add an annotation you can now edit the text the annotation applies to while writing the annotation — and you can easily remove annotations you no longer want with the Remove option.

• We’ve made some improvements to Git Sync that should improve syncs globally for all users.

  • First, we now remove duplicate files that GitBook manages when content is identical during an import.

  • GitBook now cleans up the Git tree of all files that it manages, if they’re not used in the revision on export.

• If a space admin tries to install a Git integration for an organization, and they don’t have the permission to do that, we now show a clearer message that tells them to contact their organization admin.

• We now support OpenAPI specification slugs with periods in public URLs (e.g. api.v2). This ensures that published URLs are correctly generated when using the OpenAPI feature to create reference docs.

Fixed

• Fixed some issues that could arise when you delete a collection containing content that’s linked to a published site. We now re-parent these spaces to make sure sites aren’t affected — and tell you about it with a message in the confirmation dialog.

• Fixed a small bug that should improve typing performance in the editor.

• Fixed a bug that meant palettes would sometimes show a loading state inconsistently when you switched between them.

• Fixed a bug that meant long URLs weren’t being truncated on hover within the editor.

• Fixed a bug that was causing the page content to shift position when the page outline appeared in the editor (e.g. when you added an H1 or H2 title to the page)

• Fixed an issue that prevented you from adding a page link block within a stepper block. Now you can add page link blocks as expected.

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We’re constantly working to improve the way you and your team work in GitBook, and value your input on features, bugs, and more. Make sure you head to our official GitBook community to join the discussion.