Electric Imp has a large and growing IoT developer community which now extends to more than 20,000 users. Consequently, we need to support ever wider ranges of experience and expertise among our developer community. That is the task of the Electric Imp Dev Center, which has evolved into a world-class hub for IoT product creation and Squirrel documentation. The Dev Center now hosts more than 900 pages of content — three times the number of pages three years ago. In that time, the IoT has matured, and our developers are innovating quickly.
Now the time has come to lay the foundations for the expansion of our communities and the Dev Center over the next three years and beyond. So we are excited to bring you our next-generation Dev Center.
A colorful new paint job overlays a powerful engine
The brand new site, created from the ground up, uses Drupal. For those who haven’t heard of it, Drupal is one of the leading lights in the world of online publishing content management systems. It is an open source product that has many big-name users around the globe and is backed by a diverse community of coders who keep it up to date, secure and ensure its relevance for many years to come.
Drupal brings some immediate benefits to Dev Center users:
- More rapid updates
- Faster, more accurate search
- Responsive user interface
- Platform for great new developer features
Drupal also allows us to provide a Dev Center that can continue to grow at the pace we’ve experienced over the past four years — roll on the next 900 pages! — while remaining responsive to developers accessing its resources from their browsers, and to Electric Imp’s engineers and writers as they keep the existing content up to date and add more.
You can get a taste of this flexibility in the new Dev Center’s Knowledgebase, which provides a speedily searchable database of technical notes, known issues, hints and tips, and FAQs organized by subject matter. We couldn’t offer that with Jekyll, the system we currently use to build the Dev Center.
The new Electric Imp Knowledgebase
We have also taken the opportunity to brighten up the design. In particular, we have made finding your way around the site much more intuitive and quick. The site has been reorganized into functional areas: getting started, software development, hardware design, manufacturing information, tools documentation and, with the Knowledgebase, a beefed up help section — all with the intention of making it easier for a given user to get straight to the information they need.
The primary site navigation — moved from the right to the left of the screen — is section-specific and expandable, enabling you to reach the content you want quickly without cluttering your workspace. New and updated content is flagged on the homepage, and within each of the sections, along with popular documents and library refreshes.
Improved navigation
Finally, we have given the new site its own location on the web, so please update your bookmarks. The new Dev Center can be found at https://developer.electricimp.com/
For an initial period, we’ll continue to host, but not update, the old Dev Center, so please begin making use of the new site straight away. All the content from the original site is available in the new one, which is already being updated as Electric Imp’s impCentral™ rollout continues. We’re aware of some small presentation issues, which we’re working on at the moment, but please feel free to drop us a line via the Electric Imp Forum if you spot any issues.
You are Electric Imp’s community of developers and customers, and the Dev Center is your resource. All the changes have been implemented to create a site that is more responsive and accessible for makers, engineers and manufacturers, so please do let us know if you have comments or suggestions for improvements.
We appreciate you helping us build a resource that is here to assist you for the long haul.