User docs Documentation

Documentation and books

3 articles Updated 23/10/2026 01:51

Structuring documentation as books, units and pages.

Documentation has a property that ordinary pages do not model well: reading order. The Books module exists for exactly that, giving content a fixed three-level shape — book, unit, page.

What the structure buys you

Because a book knows its chapters are ordered and each chapter knows its articles are ordered, the platform can offer a sidebar tree, previous and next links, article counts and a whole-book export without any of it being hand-maintained.

The trade

Flexibility. A page cannot sit outside a chapter, and a chapter cannot sit outside a book. If a piece of content genuinely does not belong to a chapter, it wants to be an ordinary page.

The test: if "what comes next?" is a meaningful question for the reader, it belongs in a book.

In this topic

In this chapter

In reading order.

Books, units and pages The three-level structure behind documentation, and when to use it instead of ordinary pages. Read more Creating a book Set up a book, add its chapters, and write the first article. Read more Writing good documentation Four kinds of documentation page, and why mixing them is what makes docs hard to use. Read more

Objects ReferenceGenerated from the platform, so it is always current

API ReferenceEvery REST endpoint, in cURL, PHP, Python and JavaScript

Documentation and books

What the structure buys you

The trade

In this chapter