Rails Guides Idea: Links to relevant API pages

It’d be a great improvement to the Guides if we’d have “learn more” links which would go directly to relevant API pages. Due to the nature of the API, these can’t be automatically created; they have to be handpicked. I’ve started an experimental site, putting together these links: http://railsdocs.org

But it’d make more sense for this to be part of the Guides, not a separate site. So for example, the section on Associations can link to the Associations class methods with its excellent documentation. If we code this in some intelligent way, the Guides could have an index of useful API pages.

There’s a ton of great information in the API, but it’s unfortunately hard to find. Including links w/in the Guides would bring this content to a wider audience.

This is a good proposal.

We would need a helper to generate the subdomain depending on whether we are generating edge or stable guides.

Also, your idea is related to the new API home page that I have in mind. The home page I envision has a similar purpose than your site, an index with links to the main topics. The API home page is no longer the Rails README to be able to do that. If you’d like to work on something like this it would be awesome.

:heart: love this idea.

I’m totally up for working on this. I’ll look at the Guides source and learn how they’re compiled. I can imagine a new CSS Guides style is the minimum that’d be needed: something to set up the API link for deeper information. And in the best case, this could be a simple database: a many-to-many relationship between topic areas and API pages. The db would be used by the Guides presentation code to add links at the end of each section as well as build an index of all listed API pages.

I'm totally up for working on this. I'll look at the Guides source and

learn how they're compiled. I can imagine a new CSS Guides style is the minimum that'd be needed: something to set up the API link for deeper information. And in the best case, this could be a simple database: a many-to-many relationship between topic areas and API pages.

Well, my idea is much more simple. I envision links intermixed with the content, or a section at the bottom "Related API". nothing more fancy than that.

Let's see it off-list if you like.