What has happened to the user guide

Saurav, the changes are interesting, and will help many...but there are two ways folks may still easily miss all that the docs (especially the 2000+page Developer Guide) have to offer.

First, even following the link you offer for that guide, note that there are no links on the page at all. Just a lot of top level topics. Folks have to notice instead that there is a new widget at the top of the page (on mobile, at least) that offers a full toc for the guide (to at least a couple levels of depth). As an update since I first wrote this, I do see now that on a desktop that widget appears on the left, which is at least more obvious.

But second, there's still the problem that some sections are far deeper than they present, and you can be left at a page that tantalizes with possibilities but has only a paragraph or two (yet I know from past experience there are perhaps dozens of pages on that topic).

An example is the section on "Integrate JEE and Java elements" (under "Use web elements and external objects"), available directly at:

https://helpx.adobe.com/coldfusion/developing-applications/using-web-elements-and-external-objects/integrating-jee-and-java-elements-in-cfml-applications.html

It's literally just a single sentence, but has literally 37 pages of content in that topic we can't see (as you can see in the old CF11 PDF here, with this link right to that "first page" of that section. More on the PDFs in a moment.)

Such "desert islands" (as I call them) are part of why so much about cf remains unknown to people, especially those new to it or new to the docs in the past 10 years. It was cf11 (in 2014) that the last pdf of the each of the manuals was offered. (They're still offered for download on a cf page, for those who may find that.)

And soon after the Adobe docs system changed (as you know, but I'm letting others here know), and that's when we lost so much of the docs because the new system only supported 3 levels of depth, while the cf docs had always been about 5 levels deep. So the pages ARE on the site if one can find them, but like the above even if you find them Vian searching, they often leave one at a loss to find what's "below" them.

Maybe it's time to create some variant of what you've done, so each chapter of the docs is itself another "manual", which can then have the added levels of depth needed.

It's just so sad this problem still remains, though it's clear you've made some improvement here and we appreciate that.