In a previous post, I tested a changelog-driven approach to documentation using a real open source project, the Trongate PHP framework.
The open questions then were:
Answering those questions:
It seems like the framework maintainers have hit on an automated workflow that works for them. Their AI assistant, Grady, has updated the changelog with each of the 17 releases since I published the previous article on June 9th, 2026, without apparent human intervention.
The only exceptions were a couple of releases in early to mid July, for which I updated the changelog manually.
A writer's gripe: while clearly timely and hopefully effortless for the maintainers, the AI is wordy. Whereas I pictured the changelog as a series of bullet points of about a line or so, the AI defaults to bullet paragraphs.
I realized "Will users find it useful?" was an ambitious question, and I have no good way to measure to that. I'm open to suggestions.
I searched for "changelog" on Trongate's forums, but none of the results were a user reaction.
The latest framework release was on September 27, 2026, but the docs repo has not been updated since August 25, 2026.
A one-month documentation lag for an open source project is, I would argue, hardly mission critical. However, I think this goes toward proving my point: long, narrative documentation does not lend itself to being updated at the typical rate of change of most software projects.
This wasn't a question four months ago, but after 17 releases, I wondered if the README I wrote in April, and which hasn't been updated since, still works.
It does.
I tested it again today, October 7, 2026, and the instructions still work, which, in my humble opinion, proves one of my other points: you want to keep the documentation primitive and deliberately not all-inclusive so that it remains reasonably accurate and future-proof, enduring multiple future releases with zero maintenance.
For example, navigating to the local Trongate installation's index page is a different experience today than it was in June. However, the instructions don't reference that page. Instead, they say to go to http://localhost/trongate/demo. A cheap writer's trick, but it works.