Dev Center is part of an ongoing effort to bring the Heroku developer community the best, most relevant content possible – both for developing applications on the Heroku platform and for building applications in general.

We’re only getting started with Dev Center, but we’re excited for what we have and for the possibilities on the horizon. Most importantly, though, Dev Center is for the developer community, so please let us know if you have suggestions or feedback.

Finding Content

One of the goals for Dev Center is the replacement of our well-loved docs site. Our library of articles has been growing rapidly, and the existing strategy of linking every article in the sidebar was becoming unwieldy. To deal with that (and our future plans for expanding the content even further), we’ve introduced a few changes to how you find content.

Categorization

• Overview is the new home for our Getting Started series, as well as information about the basic components of the Heroku platform and the constraints the platform imposes.

• Tutorials is where we expect to see the most growth. Currently, it houses a wealth of information on building Facebook apps, adding specific functionality to your app, and improving your app’s performance.

• Reference is just that: a place for documenting APIs, commands, options, tools, and more. You’ll find in-depth discussions of platform features, articles on the heroku command line tool, collaboration, deployment, and troubleshooting your app.

• Accounts & Billing holds information about Heroku user accounts, billing policies and procedures, and support issues.

• Add-ons are a huge part of the Heroku platform, and in this category you’ll find an overview of the program, as well as documentation on the add-ons we offer.

Search

In addition to reorganizing our articles, we’ve also been working on search. We’re using Searchify for full-text search. We’ll be watching search carefully, making sure you’re always getting the best results possible.

Staying Updated

Heroku changes quickly – we’re constantly rolling out new features, new releases, new add-ons, and more. To make it easier to keep up with that, we’ve added a changelog for the Dev Center where you can see all the articles that have been updated in the past week. We’ll be adding other ways to stay up-to-date soon, as well.

Contributing

One of the biggest changes with Dev Center is that we’re actively pursuing content from our partners and community. The Facebook tutorial, for instance, was written by our friends at Envy Labs - and we’ve got other articles by top-notch authors in the works.

We’re finalizing our authorship guidelines now, so if you’ve got expertise and a desire to help the Heroku community, watch for the opportunity to contribute your own articles to Dev Center soon.

Feedback

We’re far from done! Look for ongoing changes to Dev Center in the future, including more ways for you to get involved – but in the meantime, you can take an active part by letting us know what you think – what have we missed? What works particularly well? We’re listening!