One of the most rewarding aspects of maintaining an open-source project is engaging in ongoing dialogue with users. Over the past few weeks, I've had several online chats and interactions with fellow open educators and publishers using Docsify-This, and equally insightful conversations with those still evaluating it for their own open publishing workflows.

These dialogues have directly inspired two new features:

📝 Blog-Style Page Layouts

Seeing the ongoing familiarity of blog-style sites for both educators and students inspired a new Markdown template.  This template features automatic heading overlays over header images and a simple responsive card listing layout, minimizing the need for complex HTML while leveraging regular Markdown as much as possible.

For example, here is a **blog-style site displayed by Docsify-This, just using Markdown files for content.**

BONUS (by design): When viewing **the same Markdown files on GitHub you can tap and navigate between pages within GitHub itself too.** Markdown FTW.

🔗 Back Links to External Sites

A discussion-led observation that courses which ask students to publish their own materials in the open often require a way to link back to the course. This led to the new 'back-link' URL parameter for seamless cross-site navigation without needing access to the source Markdown file.

For example, here's a **single-page article with a back link to a course site.**

What's next? The conversation continues...💬

This post is part of the 🧡 Building Open Source with Heart Pack - a collection of posts about fostering projects users and contributors enjoy.