i know this is a little old but..... I'm wondering why links to ignition from within the ignition forum would be dead, especially if/when they are not that old. It makes no sense to me to complete remove info regardless of whether it is depreciated or not. FYI, The link in the previous reply is 6 months old. May as well remove the post also, without links some can be entirely useless.
I have found this same thing multiple times throughout, seems silly to me.
Its funny that this is displayed after trying to open the link
"Please contact the owner of the site that linked you to the original URL and let them know their link is broken."
A globally pinned post doesn't change all the dead links, if the manual was specific to the version a new version would be just that. It doesn't appear to be a very well thought out way to supercede a manual IMO.
Google hasn't caught up either, so you can do a search on google and the links are dead.
Google likely won't catch up for a while, as the new site has only been up for a little over a week.
My suggestion is that, when you come across a dead link, add a post to the thread stating such. The person who made the link should then be able to update it.
I'm not privy to any actual insider knowledge, but it's not like anyone wanted to break all the old links. As far as I know, Atlassian decided to start charging an enormous sum of money, with a relatively short notice, and it was all hands-on-deck to migrate the content before the (notoriously insecure) Confluence platform we were using went totally end of life and unsupported. Now that the most important thing is done (the content is still available, and on a modern, significantly nicer to work on platform) the team can take a breath and tackle the relatively less important things.
Permanent redirects from old links is an internet standard practice. I'd be shocked if Docusaurus didn't have a way to express in its build "this page used to be at URL such-and-such".
Someone write a web app with a table listing of all the old page titles and URLs and an empty column for the new URLs. We can all chip in and fill them in. It can then be used to generate redirects.
How many pages were there? I imagine that many of the new URLs could be scripted from the old ones and then tested by the "crowd". Add a "verified" column.
Now what software could we use to write a web app with a table and multiple simultaneous users?
I’d think a reverse proxy could handle it pretty easily. I suggested internally and informally we could crawl or query the forum for all posted links to the UM to get an idea of the set of URLs that need to be rewritten. Won’t fix bookmarks though. Ideally the mapping would have been kept track of as they ported the content.
the new manual is quiet good, but it's incredibly frustrating that all the links (from the Ignition forum or in the Google search) no longer work, and you can only search within the manual using the search bar. The new look is of no use to me if I can't find anything.
It would be good if expression functions with asterisks like add*, get*, *Between were searchable with a full name. Currently, I can only access them manually, or the search function gives me scripting functions.
I don't want this to come across negatively, because I think transitioning the documentation to a more current framework was a good decision. I have a feeling that the broken forum links are going to be a really big problem though. My experience of searching the forum for the past few hours has already resulted in several minor temper tantrums.
No easy solution seems apparent, but maybe the community hive mind can figure something out. One (probably stupid) idea: Maybe a local copy of the manual could be installed at a specific path on a user's system, and then via a bulk operation change all of the old user manual links to point to the local folder location? No idea how this would work with different OSs, etc. Just a thought to maybe spark some discussion.
Thanks for pointing this out, I'll pass this on and see if we can tweak the search configuration for cases like these.
In the meantime, we are working on a workaround for the broken links! Hoping to push a patch in the near future. Thanks for all your patience as we work through this.
Maybe it just takes some getting used to, but I found the search function to be more intuitive and accurate in the previous version. Search results pertaining to naming of components or script functions that I'm looking for used to be at the top of the list, but now it seems to pull from other parts of the manual where it's used for examples.
Most noticeable change for me is that if I pop "Ignition [subject matter here]" into my search bar, search engines will no longer return user manual links. It seems like I need to append "User Manual" specifically to get those results to return.
Not sure this is something you have any control over, but I did appreciate your docs being among the first results returned for any given search.
So, after a few days of using the new doc... I can say I'm not a fan.
The pages I use the most are the functions index (both python and expressions), and I used to ctrl-F things on there. Now, with the functions tucked away into categories, it doesn't work anymore.
I guess I'll get used to it, but it's a bit annoying.
