Version selector for websites and html books

[eitsupi]

I believe it is possible to create a version selector on the current nav bar, but a dedicated feature might be useful.
Or it would be great to have instructions on how to set up a version selector in the documentation.

For example, in the case of the Hugo theme Docsy https://www.docsy.dev/docs/adding-content/versioning/

[FabienSe]

This can be a really cool addition to manage technical documentation on a website. Seeing a previous version of the documentation can be a primary function in some use case (example: documentation linked to the version of a software).

[mcanouil]

FYI, #5342

[kanglcn]

Seconded. I am working on packages under the nbdev framework which use quarto as backend for documentation website generator. It will be a great feature if quarto support version selector then the generated package doc will have it too!

[cameronrutherford]

+1 as this my current biggest gripe with Quarto over ReadTheDocs as a documentation tool. Once Quarto has versioning it will be perfect ;)

cc @ryandanehy

[austinwpearce]

Just putting my vote in for versioning for Quarto sites being used for tech docs.

[venpopov]

Any updates on plans to implement such a feature? I'm considering a use-case for publishing research manuscripts as websites and it would be very useful to be able to tie a github release tag to a versioned website, as revision to a project occur.

An additional usecase is creating course websites. I'm planning to do that for courses I teach, and it would be really nice to be able to have a selector for the semester/year for courses that I teach multiple times.

[cscheid]

I'm sorry to be the bearer of unwanted news, but I think we're unlikely to implement such a feature in the foreseeable future.

We discuss this issue often internally, and we understand why it's an attractive thing. However, it is our current opinion that:

• versioned websites are not handled well by search engine infrastructure, and
• a proliferation of websites with slightly different content currently makes it harder, not easier, to find the version one is typically looking for

As a result, we would prefer to nudge folks towards making decisions that reduce the need for versioned websites to be there, and we are choosing to invest our engineering time elsewhere. We understand that this is not everyone's preferred solution, but that's where we are.

[venpopov]

Even if I disagree with the reasoning, I appreciate the candid response and that the team has clearly given it a lot of thought.