Exciting Changes at ThinkGeo

We are happy to announce several new and exciting advancements here at ThinkGeo that we think you will enjoy. These include a new website, move to GitLab, new documentation site, and more.  

Our New Website

We are happy to unveil our new website at ThinkGeo.com. We wanted to explain our products and services better and connect our customers to the best learning resources available. Our new platform will also make it quicker and easier for us to provide new and updated content as we move forward with our future plans. In addition, we wanted to simplify and streamline our offerings to provide a better supported set of base services.  

Goals 

• Streamline the ‘getting started’ experience 

• Allow customers to find support resources more easily 

• Make the site more visually appealing 

• Provide a better mobile experience 

• Allow us to more quickly add and update content 

DevOps Moves to GitLab 

Our move to GitLab brings into focus our commitment to making ThinkGeo samples, documentation, and other assets more easily available and in a form, developers are familiar with. We have setup separate repositories for each of our products that holds the samples, offline docs, and quick start guides in an easy to navigate structure.  

Goals 

• Move to a modern DevOps platform that was reliable and feature rich 

• Allow developers easy access to samples and documentation 

• Provide a set of learning resources that are kept up-to-date and working 

• Enable versioning of samples and documentation over time though git tags 

• Embrace modern standards developers expect 

Introducing docs.thinkgeo.com

For several years our wiki was the main source of information for ThinkGeo’s product line and that is now being updated to a new site: docs.thinkgeo.com. Going forward, this will be the main source of documentation and information about all our products. Our decision to move away from the wiki was driven by wanting to adopt a format that easier to read, have better control over styling, and allow us to use markdown for all our documents moving forward.  

We will regularly update the new site and, over time, pull in more legacy product information. While wiki.thinkgeo.com will not immediately going away, it will be frozen and eventually fully replaced by the new docs site.  

Goals 

• Apply a pleasing style to our documentation 

• Base documentation on markdown for portability 

• Take of advantage of CI Pipelines for keeping documentation always up to date 

• Incorporate versioning into our documentation layout 

How Do I Samples Overhaul (In Progress) 

While we have always had ‘How Do I’ samples, we also had hundreds of other samples in several places that were not always easy to find. This caused confusion on which samples were the best to start with and provided a good overview of all the features we have in our products. It also caused us issues on how to properly maintain these samples and ensure that they were always updated and working.  

In our new sample structure, we are going to limit the number of samples to only those that provide the highest impact. Other samples will be merged into the ‘How Do I’ samples to showcase product features. This way it’s easier for you to check out one sample to see the entire set of features we have to offer. This also allows us to focus on one main set of samples to ensure that they are always updated and follow best practices for using our products.  

Moving forward, we will be integrating more samples into the ‘How Do I’ sample and update them to make more sense and offer better context. Now, there are several products that still have separate samples, and these will be combined in the near future, so we have a uniform look and feel across the product line.  

Goals 

• Create a centralized sample for each product showcasing all of its features 

• Ensure every sample makes sense in the context of real world use case 

• Revamp the look and data used to enhance the samples’ value 

What’s Next 

There is quite a bit planned over the next few months, including the revamping of our ‘How Do I’ samples, updates to our documentation, and more. On the product side, we are focusing our efforts on increasing rendering speed across all our controls, as well as getting ready for Blazor WebAssembly.  

If you have any questions, comments, or ideas, feel free to contact us.