🧑‍🍳 Ideas for new guides or improvements to existing content

[bjohansebas]

Hey folks, the Express team wants to know what content you’d like to see in the documentation — for example, topics for new guides at any level, or what content could be updated in the existing guides. This is more focused on the content itself, not the UI. Once we know what content you’d like, we can start thinking about how to classify and organize it within the UI.

All of this will help the documentation team better organize the content so that the information is more accessible for everyone, and this sitepage becomes the central information hub for Express.

Please share each new idea about the content in a separate comment so people can vote on it.

cc: @expressjs/triagers @expressjs/docs-wg

[bjohansebas]

Something I’d like to have is a tutorial, perhaps building a finance dashboard or a project that’s not too simple but not overly complex either, with the goal of showcasing everything Express can do while also teaching good practices.

The idea would be to make it interactive, with a flow similar to what Astro offers in its tutorial (https://docs.astro.build/en/tutorial/0-introduction/)

Obviously, with the current structure, it’s quite difficult to add this kind of content (and make it easily accessible for people to read), so this idea could be developed once we’ve switched frameworks and completed part of the redesign that will come with the new way we organize our information.

[bjohansebas]

It would also be great to start creating guides that showcase and better explain all the middlewares we have. For example, guides that cover all the middlewares we use for sessions or cookies, authentication in Express (showing the official middleware we have), but also presenting other popular options as a starting point.

Obviously, I can further expand on these ideas by opening a new discussion covering what these guides could include, but mainly what I see is:

• Compression
• Sessions
• Auth
• Cookies
• Cache in express
• File uploads with Multer, and also file downloads, I often see many mistakes that could be avoided by adding guides.
• Data streaming

With this, we could also reduce the current guides to have less content but be more focused, which I believe is the direction we should take.

[ShubhamOulkar]

Add docs links on (starter > basic routing page)[https://expressjs.com/en/starter/basic-routing.html]

This page has link to (routing guide)[https://expressjs.com/en/guide/routing.html] but not for https://expressjs.com/en/guide/using-middleware.html and https://expressjs.com/en/guide/writing-middleware.html. Also this page do not mention it is built in middleware. 🤔

Adding those links and clarifying the concept of middleware on the "Basic Routing" page would be a huge improvement for developers new to Express. It would bridge the gap between seeing a function used and understanding the core concept behind it.

ref PR: #2047, #2037

Edit: Should we document dedicated express built in middleware pages with use case examples? Ref: #2037 (comment)