How to handle different versions of a TKB (documentation) article?

[tealiumjustin]

We are using TKB to document SDK installations. As we release newer versions of the SDK the documentation changes, so we update the article to reflect these changes. However, we still want to offer the older versions of the TKB for users that haven't upgraded. We thought of creating separate articles, where the most current version would always be the master article and older versions would get a version number appended to the title, but then you end up with a lot of duplicated content, which is bad for Google indexing. The different versions might share 90% of their content, with only some changes, so separate articles seems like overkill.  Any clever solutions out there?

Example:

"SDK Install" (current, version 3.0)

"SDK Install version 2.0"

"SDK Install version 1.0"

[Fellsteruk]

Not done it yet....

But I've got a similar challenge and my intended solution is to use "show/hides" or something similar to a spoiler in the forum thread, you can keep your vote generic content in the bulk of the body then have show/hides for the deltas of each version.

This way you keep it all in a single document and SEO is optimised for all traffic and all versions to a single URL

[tealiumjustin]

Thanks for sharing that approach. I'd be interested in seeing that in action once it's complete. It sounds like it would get tedious to be editing the source (assuming that's necessary)?

[Fellsteruk]

We've not started it yet but it depending on the implementation my plan is to have a simple ton template where we can add/remove extra divs which are styled, animated for the desired effect.

Editing should be easy enough via the wysiwyg, however I think if your getting to 5 or more versions then you'd be wanting to look at breaking the content into multiple articles, no one wants a monster ton that takes an age to read 🙂

[tealiumjustin]

Ok, sounds like versioning in the way I describe is not supported natively. I think we are going to move certain docs into Github and serve them from there.