Link old Bootstrap docs to latest release

This likely is going to be a pain in the ass, but I wanted to capture some thoughts regardless of where we land on it. My hope is that we can put some time into our old v4.x docs and update them with new outdated release banners and links to the latest versions of each page in our versions pickers. I’d like help brainstorming our approach to this, because right now all I can think of is manually doing it one by one.

Two things are on my mind for it.

Updated new release banner

First is updating the release banner, and adding it to all previous v4.x releases.

Right now there’s a thin banner on the 4.0, 4.1, and 4.2 docs. We don’t have them on 4.3 or 4.4, and soon 4.5 (after we ship our next v4.6.0 release). At a minimum, we need to:

• Add banner 4.3
• Add banner to 4.4

And for the stretch goal, we take it 1-2 steps further:

• Change the links of each banner to be page-specific (as in, don’t link to https://getbootstrap.com on every banner)
• Redesign the banner to be larger and more noticeable

Updated versions dropdown

Beyond the new version banners, I’d like us to do something more with our versions dropdowns in the navbar. Each version of our docs (4.0–4.5) is different, which leads to unfortunate experiences of viewing outdated docs and not being able to easily jump to the latest version of the page.

Question is, do we include every version like so?

• 4.0: 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 4.4, 4.5
• 4.1: 4.2, 4.3, 4.4, 4.5
• 4.2: 4.3, 4.4, 4.5
• 4.3: 4.4, 4.5
• 4.4: 4.5
• Bootstrap v5.x

Or, do we do the version you’re reading, the latest v4.x, and the latest v5.x like so?

• 4.0: 4.5
• 4.1: 4.5
• 4.2: 4.5
• 4.3: 4.5
• 4.4: 4.5
• Bootstrap v5.x

And, lastly, for all v4 and v5 versions dropdowns, do we include links to v3 and v2? Thinking we can drop those with these changes, and keep the All versions link.

v3?

Beyond v4’s docs, I’m wondering if we need to update v3.4’s docs to modify the new release banner and versions dropdown. Thinking we modify the text in the banner to mention v4 and v5. With the dropdown, I’m thinking we remove the v4 alpha 6 release finally, update Latest (4.x) to Bootstrap v4.x, and add Bootstrap v5.x. Both the v4 and v5 could point to their latest releases instead of all the releases.

Screenshots of dropdowns

Just for quick comparison…

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What do you think @twbs/team?

[folknor]

My ticket https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/issues/36189 was closed as a duplicate of this one, but I had actually read this ticket before filing mine 😛 I feel like I suggested things that were quite different from what has been discussed here thus far.

Hope you will take that into consideration and read my ticket if/when you do any work towards this. Thank you!

Of course if you want I’ll gladly repeat the highlights from it here.

EDIT: That said, I must say I do commend you a lot for keeping a much cleaner issue tracker than most other projects this size. That’s not a small feat at all.

[Johann-S]

A dynamic way would be to find if Github provide an API, which allow us to fetch our tags and use our tags to select a version (+ a bit of JavaScript)