13 May: Global reusable content and an all-new sidebar design

You can now create reusable content and add it anywhere in your organization — plus some major sidebar improvements, bug fixes and more

✨ New and noteworthy

Reuse content across your entire organization

We’ve made reusable content organization-wide, so you can now add any reusable content to any page, in any space in your org.

Previously, reusable content was locked to a specific space, so you could only use it there. Global reusable content means you can keep information consistent between multiple docs sites or site sections without duplicating it and risking instances getting out of sync.

You can add reusable content from other spaces by hitting / on an empty block and scrolling to (or searching for) the Reusable content section. Here you’ll see all the reusable content from the current space, along with a new menu option that shows content from other spaces.

From there you can search through all the content in your organization to find the block you need.

Major sidebar improvements

We’ve reworked the GitBook sidebar with a new design and some big upgrades.

You’ll instantly notice that there’s more space and less clutter. The content in the sidebar is now 30% more compact, so you can see more of your content at once.

We’ve also made it resizable — so you can adjust the width to fit your workflow. Plus, we’ve added a new collapsed more to help you focus on your docs content. Drag the sidebar off the left of the screen or hit the Hide sidebar button and it will slide off the screen. It’ll pop up again when your hover your cursor to the edge of the window, then hide when you move your cursor away — so you can access everything you need without expanding and collapsing it manually.

The nav has seen improvements, too. The organization button at the top now houses your settings, theme controls, and invite options — freeing up a ton of space down at the bottom of the sidebar. And the theme controls now also offer a ‘System’ setting to match the rest of your apps.

Finally, we’ve improved the Docs sites section of the sidebar. Expand a site to see all of the sections and variants within it — complete with their icons — without any unnecessary extra nesting. So you can quickly find the sites you need, navigate to the spaces within them, and collapse the sidebar to focus on your work.

Transform paragaphs into more block types

Until now, you could only turn paragraph blocks into other kinds of basic text blocks -- H1, H2 or H3 headers.

Now, you can turn a paragraph block into all kinds of other blocks. Including:

• Headings (H1, H2, H3)

• Hint

• Unordered, ordered or task lists

• Code block

• Quote

• Tabs

• Stepper

• Expandable

This should make it easier to switch your content quickly to give it more structure or add some hierarchy.

Improved

• More editor improvements! Expandable blocks now properly support double-clicks to select whole words, and also properly honor browser settings such as smart quotes, if you have them enabled. This writer in particular is very happy, thank you team! ❤️

• We’ve improved the site customization space selector. Previously the picker was limited to 10 spaces — if your site had more, you couldn’t override the customization settings for them. Now the picker does away with the limit, uses your site’s structure, and will display site sections as well as variants.

• You can now filter comments in spaces and change requests by author, so you can check on a specific person’s feedback, one at a time. Open the sidebar and use the drop-down menu at the top to select or search for a user.

Fixed

• Fixed a bug that prevented you from adding or manually editing the color HEX codes in the customization menu.

• Fixed an issue that caused image errors if backend GitBook’s resizing system didn’t work properly. Now we’ll show the original image as a backup if the resize causes an error.

• Fixed an issue that meant copy and past would sometimes fail due to an incorrect attach node.

• Fixed an issue where some API endpoints would respond with a 500 error if a space was not found.

• Fixed a number of visual bugs with the image block, which were particularly noticeable when a block had multiple images in a gallery.

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We’re constantly working to improve the way you and your team work in GitBook, and value your input on features, bugs, and more. Make sure you head to our official GitBook community to join the discussion.