I appreciate that they've got more and more content and need to scale the interface complexity to handle it.
But I am a little sad to see the old help pages go. There's something wonderful about a single list of articles down the left, and you click one and read it. It's just... minimal, in the best sense of the word.
The new Dev Center reminds me of MSDN... and hours of misery trolling through overly verbose articles about all kinds of crap.
Part of me wonders if limiting yourself to a really simple structure for your help system isn't a GOOD thing. It forces you to keep the content really simple and to-the-point, because you simply don't have space to rattle on and create a confusing web of documentation.
They didn't manage to keep their existing URLs working. E.g., http://docs.heroku.com/background-jobs used to exist (it was cached as a search result by Google), but it now redirects to http://devcenter.heroku.com/background-jobs, which merely says "Page Not Found" (which should be a 404 error but isn't) and only suggests "Loading..." because the author failed to handle progressive enhancement (the menu on the left is non-functioning, for the same reason). I know these guys aren't claiming web development as a competency they sell, but I wouldn't release in a state like that.
But I am a little sad to see the old help pages go. There's something wonderful about a single list of articles down the left, and you click one and read it. It's just... minimal, in the best sense of the word.
The new Dev Center reminds me of MSDN... and hours of misery trolling through overly verbose articles about all kinds of crap.
Part of me wonders if limiting yourself to a really simple structure for your help system isn't a GOOD thing. It forces you to keep the content really simple and to-the-point, because you simply don't have space to rattle on and create a confusing web of documentation.
Just a thought.