A software library is only as good as its documentation. Documentation must guide users on how to approach a new piece of software, and how to make the most out of it. And it must also be a place to learn the new concepts unlocked by the software itself.
With these goals in mind, we’re announcing our fully-revamped documentation website!
You may know OpenZeppelin from the OpenZeppelin Contracts project, but did you know you can also our tools to:
- Deploy, interact with and upgrade your smart contracts from the command-line
- Write sophisticated tests for your smart contracts in a blazing-fast Testing Environment
- Create Ethereum applications where your users don’t need to use Ether
- Set up a web application using React, Infura and MetaMask with contracts hot-loading in a single command
Over the last couple of months, we’ve been hard at work polishing the user experience of all our tools and writing rich tutorials and guides for each of them, explaining how they all come together and presenting a cohesive offering.
Ethereum Newcomers Welcome
The ecosystem’s rapid evolution makes it hard for new people to approach the space: blogposts become outdated in a matter of months, and proper introductory guides are scattered and incomplete.
To tackle this need, we put together a series of newcomer-friendly guides under the ‘Learn’ category, covering the different stages of the smart contract development process in a problem-oriented manner, including:
- Writing and compiling your first smart contract
- Deploying and interacting with contracts in a local environment
- Setting up automated smart contract tests to speed up development
- Building a web front-end from scratch
- Using a public test network
- Upgrading the code of deployed systems
- Getting ready to go to mainnet
It is our hope that these will improve the experience of new developers coming to Ethereum, as well as introduce the different OpenZeppelin tools in a sensible way.
Pick and Choose
The wide scope of OpenZeppelin tools means they can be used to manage your whole project. This can be a gradual process however: you don’t have to drop your complete stack to try them out.
Each OpenZeppelin tool fits a specific use-case, and can be used independently of the rest, allowing for great flexibility and mix-and-match of different development frameworks.
OpenZeppelin Open Source
All of our tools are fully open source, with the Contracts repository featuring over 200 independent contributors.
Following this trend, our documentation site itself is also open source, any mistakes you find or improvements you want to make are just a Pull Request away!