>>>>>> NOTE: For an update on our documentation work, go here! <<<<<<
We suspect some of you don’t really love reading software documentation. Don’t ask us how we know. We just know. And we won’t tell the technical writers.
You see, our tech writers have been progressively improving the Kill Bill manuals. We have not one, but three technical writers, so you know we’re serious about our documentation.
Besides improving the docs, we’ve also refreshed the user interface for the Kill Bill manuals and added a global search function to search across the various manuals. (Previously, you could only search in the document that was currently displayed.)
Since we’re an open-source organization that doesn’t have a bazillion dollar budget for instructional designers, the Kill Bill guides are the way to go for learning our billing and payment system. This blog post covers some of the basics of our documentation system.
Navigating the Docs
We have lots of documentation that we’ve categorized by type. When you arrive at the Kill Bill Doc Center, the text you see on the left lists all the manuals we’ve created for Kill Bill.
The red headers indicate the type of manual it is. The black headers are the manual titles:
Click on a manual title to open the manual in the main viewing area.
Moving Around the Kill Bill Manuals
Once you have opened a manual, you can see its overall structure on the right nav bar (see below). As you scroll down or up, the currently displayed section heading is highlighted in red.
To move from section to section in the manual, click on the section headings on the right:
Opening the API Manuals
Access our API documentation in one of two ways:
- From the Kill Bill Doc Center: Click on Integration > REST API Reference on the left side nav.
- From the browser address bar: Go to https://killbill.github.io/slate/
You’ll immediately notice that we use a different user interface for our API documentation. (The three-panel display of the Slate platform works better for API docs.) The API search function is located at the top left.
A Documentation Caveat and a Request
The documentation is a work in progress, and we’re in the midst of planning to reorganize them in Q2 and Q3. So plan on quite a few changes quite soon!
If you find a problem (typos, broken link, etc.), the documentation lives in a GitHub repository, so submit a pull request to report it. We’d love to hear about it—really—because it means you’re actually reading the documentation! That makes our tech writers very, very happy.
One More Thing… Video Tutorials
On a slightly related topic, we have several Kaui tutorial videos. We created them several years ago, but the basic concepts are still valid. To watch them, visit the Kaui playlist on our YouTube channel.
Until Next Month!
To learn more about the Kill Bill open-source billing and payments platform:
- Read the overview
- Watch the introductory video
- Get started with Kill Bill
- Join the Kill Bill Community
