Read the Docs newsletter - July 2021

Welcome to a new edition of our monthly newsletter, where we share the most relevant updates around Read the Docs, offer a summary of new features we shipped during the previous month, and share what we’ll be focusing on in the near future.

Company highlights

  • Eric presented the history of the company at the Upstream 2021 conference along with ideas for open source sustainability. You can read more about it in our recent blog post.

  • We revamped our sustainability page to clarify the ways in which you or your project can go ad-free.

  • The first two parts of the Sphinx tutorial we are writing in the context of the CZI grant were merged to the development branch, and will be publicly available soon in the official Sphinx documentation.

  • We finalized the design of our upcoming Embed API v3, which will open up more possibilities of embedding content inside and outside Read the Docs. Watch this space for updates on the topic.

  • One extra person will join our team as Frontend Developer. More details coming soon!

New features

  • We added a new functionality to rebuild a specific PR build. A small user experience improvement that we hope is useful to many of our users (see image below).

  • We added a JSON schema of our configuration file to JSON Schema Store. If your editor has support for JSON schema, it will now give you autocompletion and linting for our .readthedocs.yml.

Link to rebuild a specific build

Link to rebuild a specific build

Thanks to our external contributors @mongolsteppe, Florian Bruhin, Seth Falco, Rémi Verschelde, Chris Holdgraf, and Maksudul Haque.

You can always see the latest changes to our platforms in our Read the Docs Changelog.

Upcoming features

  • Anthony will focus on getting our Sphinx theme to support Sphinx 4.0 along with our external contributor Aaron Carlisle, finishing up the financial summary of 2020, and onboarding our new Frontend hire.

  • Eric will continue working on our sales process and doing pull request reviews, along with managing other ongoing projects. In addition, he will push forward the proposal to add audit tracking along with Manuel.

  • Juan Luis is now collaborating more closely with the Sphinx team and will submit the third part of our beginners tutorial. In addition, he will lead a documentation sprint at SciPy, and start working on an introductory tutorial for Read the Docs.

  • Manuel has already started with the implementation of our Embed API v3 and will continue working on it for the coming weeks, apart from improving our data backups and implementing the first pieces of our audit tracking.

  • Santos will keep on working with the refactoring of our codebases so our commercial and community sites are easier to maintain. He will also write a new guide about how to use unsupported VCS platforms on Read the Docs.

Possible issues

Our release from June 15th contains a security advisory to our CSRF settings.

On an unrelated note, we are receiving more support requests from our users about some software versions in our Docker images, and we have decided to give that work more priority.


Considering using Read the Docs for your next Sphinx or MkDocs project? Check out our documentation to get started!