How to make hosted Outline app public/open for everyone?

[shtefcs]

First of all, wonderful work. Simple, clean, and powerful. Exactly what I was looking for as an open-source project for a while.

We have self-hosted Outline, and I am using it to create documentation for our project Automatio.co.

My question is how to make everything publicly available, and not locked under the registration gate? I mean on Collections and all documents under it?

We want to use Outline as public documentation, so everyone can access it and be indexable by search engines.

Is this possible with Outline? I can see its a perfect platform for such a thing, except I can't figure it out how to make everything public.

[balupton]

Good thing I found this, as it somewhat matches my use case for mixing and matching public and private content, for a personal knowledge base of which some pages are shared with peers and some are completely public.

Keen to hear the answer. If there isn't an official solution, considering their expansive API, perhaps one could setup a cloudflare worker or static generator that renders the "public" pages publicly.

[tommoor]

Is this possible with Outline? I can see it's a perfect platform for such a thing, except I can't figure it out how to make everything public.

It's not currently possible but we plan on building out this functionality in the near future. In the meantime someone could definitely develop a solution based on the API.

[shtefcs]

Is this possible with Outline? I can see it's a perfect platform for such a thing, except I can't figure it out how to make everything public.

It's not currently possible but we plan on building out this functionality in the near future. In the meantime someone could definitely develop a solution based on the API.

So many people will need the same, and I am not really sure why you are missing such a big chunk of users, just by having that simple feature? Its been a while since people searched, it's not a new concept.

[benjamin-carriou]

+1

[onny]

Maybe we could open an issue to keep track on the progress of this implementation. I'm also very interested in this!

[aresstokrat]

That's definitely a gem feature to have.

[piyushdatazip]

Waiting for this feature, Is there a public roadmap for Outline @tommoor ?

[d41ly]

In the current version of Outline you can publicly share your collections and make them available to everyone, without registration.

[piyushdatazip]

Actually we're using Outline for Customer documentation, currently we're doing the same as you said, sharing links. and waiting for this as this will help in exposing all docs at home url.

[keithfawcett]

Making individual docs in Collections public is not ideal. There is no sidebar for these so it's nearly impossible to make a public site with Outline.

[tommoor]

There is a sidebar, this is how our own help guides are published.

Collection sharing is next on the roadmap though,currently rebuilding collection permissions UI to allow for this

[keithfawcett]

ok, I figured it out, but it wasn't easy to understand. I had to create a Collection, then create a doc, then create a nested doc. Only then will you get a sidebar.

If you only have a Collection and doc, without a nested doc, then the sidebar doesn't show (but the space is there, it's just missing the logo, search field, and document structure).