What is the status of the Examples page on the documentation site?

Questions
1

Last year I was shopping for a browser-based 3D engine and what really sold me on Babylon.js was the Examples page of the documentation. I used it to demo the engine for use at my job, and it was my primary learning resource and reference while getting started. Is this page coming back, or is there anything I can do to help get it back online?

I found this commit (which seems to just redirect away from the page) suggesting that examples are coming back soon examples coming soon · BabylonJS/Documentation@9cba1a3 · GitHub
This is an archive of the page for anyone unfamiliar: https://web.archive.org/web/20201029061227/https://doc.babylonjs.com/examples/

Sorry if this is the wrong place to ask this, I didn’t want to resurrect a 4 month old announcement and I’m not sure where else to put it.

2

Pinging @PirateJC

3

Hey @Knar! Super glad to know that the examples were such an impactful part of the documentation. When we reorganized the documentation in late 2020, this was one of the pages that changed a bit.

The page is gone, but the content actually still exists, it’s just in a different location.

You can now find the examples directly in the playground and more nicely organized:
https://playground.babylonjs.com/

Once on this page in the top right corner, you’ll find this icon:
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Click that button and the examples pane pops out!

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It may look a little different than before. We added a few examples, and pulled a few out as we felt was relevant to people’s learning paths with Babylon.js. But they are still there!

Sorry that this wasn’t clear where to find them!

I’ll give some thought to the idea of including the same examples pane in the documentation somehow

Hope this helps!

4

Thank you! I would have never looked there, that icon reads “journal” to me.

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5

A Playground Examples page could be a nice addition, for example near Offsite Tutorials?

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6

From a UX perspective, I’d suggest the following:

  • Replace (or at least supplement) the unreadable “book” icon in the Playground with a text that literally says “Examples” so users can actually find it
  • In the documentation sidebar, add a separate category link called “Examples” to the very top (or bottom) to make it as easy as possible to discover, since it’s likely to be one of the first things someone might be interested in. Hiding it under some obscure subcategory would be doing your (newer) users a disservice :slight_smile:
    This link could either lead to a separate /examples page listing all the Playground examples by category, or (arguably worse) open the Playground directly but have the Examples panel opened by default in this view

I feel like examples are crucial for someone to quickly answer very specific questions (“How do I do X?”), for standard problems, and as it stands now you’d have to search the entire documentation for any example that might pertain to your problem.

The “Getting started” guide isn’t a replacement as it serves a different purpose (tutorial vs. “cooking recipe”), and while the Playground provides examples it’s not really searchable in terms of functionality and therefore only useful if you actually know which playground example demonstrates which feature.

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