I haven't played much with the new API tool yet - it looks like a huge improvement. One thing I still struggle with is understanding a widget's CSS properties and what can be commonly changed (e.g. the font for the items in a combobox). I know firebug can be used to get some of this information but I find it frustrating for CSS inspection. The documentation has come a long way, the book is a great source of information but I fear it is starting to get out of sync with changes in newer dojo releases. For that matter, would it make sense to save a copy of the book with each major release? Probably not... Performance on the website can still be a drag, sometimes too many connection errors, but I know you are taking steps to address (or have already).

I don't use the forums as much as I used to, but I watch the RSS feeds for them - it still seems like the grid is the main source of questions. Not sure if that's due to needing more documetation/examples, or just the complexity of the grid widget. Any improvements that can be made with understanding the grid would be great.

One other suggestion - something I love about php.net is I can type "php.net/preg_replace" into the address bar of my browser and VERY quickly the documentation on that function loads. I can't think of anything else that matches it for speed and ease of use. Perhaps something similar could be done for dojo, type: "dojotoolkit.org/dijit.titlePane" and redirected to API doc page?

This is mainly a ramble - I don't have many complaints, but I don't think I really "navigate" the dojotoolkit.org site, I come here for the book and hopefully now for the API. RSS is extremely useful for the blog and forums - be nice to even have RSS for changes to the book.

Thanks again for all the work,

Josh

I think that could be more comments on the API tool, i mean, more description about function and attributes. But probably dojo team are working on it.

Thanks for this new tool, i was needing that!

I'm sure you're tired of hearing this but here goes anyway. Dojo has many good features and it has come a long way from the days of Dojo 0.4. Because of the lack of documents and easy to use samples, the true value proposition of Dojo is still getting lost IMHO. The problems I see is many want instant gratification with RIA and not take the time to really understand how a toolkit works before deciding if it's a good fit or not.

This is kind of short sighted but it is what it is. Similar to what jQuery or YUI has done, people want to see UI components that a toolkit has to offer, see it in action, look at the code and do a cut and paste to "quickly" reuse it in their application. Dojo campus is an excellent start for all this. I hope this site continues to become better, fast! Couple of things you can do to this site is further simplify the samples and also provide additional tabs for easy to read usage or "how to" documents and JS-Docs.

You also need to improve on the document where a developer wants to extend or customize a given component for features or look and feel. Today this is not an easy task for many and requires one to look at the actual javascript code or css files.

Dojo is a truly unique toolkit thanks to the many talented contributors. Keep up the good work.

The first thing striking about the dojotoolkit site is there is no overt use of dojo itself. Even the 'dijit at a glance' docs seem to be dojo averse. Screenshots of widgets instead of the actual widgets?! Very bad impression. Should have dojo widgets everywhere with panes below saying click here to see the source, then links from there to more details about how to customize it, which brings me to:

The second thing is that there are not enough breadcrumb trails for js neophytes. If the example widget does not do exactly what you want from it, one is quickly at a loss for where to go next. Obvious example is CSS customization as mentioned above by someone else. Less obvious examples are things like events. How can I change the behavior of a dijit to respond to a different event, or can I even do that? There are many examples where a dijit is 95% what I need, out of the box, but figuring out how to tweak that last 5% is futile.

Incidentally (2 cents), I've been learning that at least 5 (or 9) out of 10 js experts don't care about ANY of the available js toolkits. They just want, and will, roll their own because it's not that hard if you're an expert, apparently. So, the main selling point of dojo must be for the js neophyte.

I agree with rjbalest (except for the last point). I have always been surprised with the continual use of screenshots instead of simple working examples. In the few cases where live examples are used I find they cause an error when using Internet Explorer (V7 in my case) which I use by default so I always have to start up Firefox just to see the doco on Trees and Grids. Now I know the majority of the open source community favours Firefox but when I.E. still has the major market share I believe it is important to ensure everything works well with it. This would certainly turn some people off as it would appear to be not working.

I think the "Simple Grid" needs to start with an even simpler Grid for beginners (who most likely will be the ones using the doco). The alternating single and double columns did my head in to begin with. I had to go to the Grid tests to get a better idea. How about a simple property grid of name/value pairs to begin with and build it up from there. Some doco and example on programmatically adding rows would also be useful (in my case I had to rely on the tests again to work this out).

Some of the links are also confusing as you have current V1.1 doco under URL's starting with "http://dojotoolkit.org/book/dojo-book-0-9/"

You need something like the "Dojo feature explorer" only 1 click off the home page and enhanced to cover a wider range of examples particularly the Tree and Grid which could be regarded as showcase widgets (i.e. most visible complex behaviour) to give viewers a taste of the power of dojo.

I'm only a Dojo beginner, so I havn't visited the full width and breadth of the resources available, but I and my colleague have found that the API and examples in many places leave a lot to be desired.
We've tried some examples and tutorials, only to find they are for earlier versions and therefore don't work. I've come across a good few grid tutorials for instance, that simply don't work, and trying to get them to work results in finding functions that no longer exist or in a different part of Dojo. We also often find using the API frustrating - the function is there, but what it does and what its parameters do is sometimes completely ambiguous. The API search often doesn't return any results, and instead gives a permissions error.

Having said all that, the more recent examples I've seen are of high quality and very well done, and Dojo itself is excellent.

If you could clean up the documentation/tutorials by getting rid of deprecated examples/updating them, and improve the API documentation, that would be a fantastic improvement.

Cheers