Drupal Dojo Session: Documenting (in) Drupal: the next generation

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kvantomme's picture
Start: 
2010-11-23 12:30 - 13:30 America/New_York
Event type: 
Training (free or commercial)

The book module is often seen as the documentation in/for Drupal. But it falls short in a couple of areas:

  • There is only 1 hierarchy that never really fits all needs
  • There are no standards in structuring the information inside a post, so 1 post might actually explain more than 1 topic
  • You can only export individual pages or top level chapters with their children, you can't easily export cherry-picked topics (across chapters) into 1 document
  • Version management is handled through the forking of the whole documentation

In this session I'll explain about single sourcing and DITA (Darwin Information Type Architecture) and how it solves all of the above issues and more. I'll also do a demo of our work on a set of Drupal modules for DITA that we've been working on.

Register to Attend https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/428898761

Comments

more information

kvantomme's picture

A big thank you for all the attendees, much more information about our work with the DITA in Drupal is available at http://www.pronovix.com/category/all/dita as soon as I know where the video will be available I'll post an update here.

--

Check out more of my writing on our blog and my Twitter account.

Dojo Session--"Documenting

eric_sea's picture

Dojo Session--"Documenting (in) Drupal: the next generation" is now available. http://drupaldojo.com/session/documenting-drupal-next-generation

DITA Module Demonstration

eric_sea's picture

DITA Module Demonstration scheduled for next Dojo Session:
http://groups.drupal.org/node/108579

Point of clarification--DITA

eric_sea's picture

Point of clarification--DITA and Docs on Drupal.Org

While DITA may offer some exciting options for Documentation on Drupal.org, conversations regarding DITA options are only just getting started. There have been no official decisions by the document team leadership regarding DITA implementation of Drupal.org

Those of use working on the Drupal Open Learning Initiative are very excited about the future potential of DITA and we are looking forward to continuing the discussion with those on the Documents Team and in the DITA community.

I mentioned this in the

kvantomme's picture

I mentioned this in the screencast, but just to make things clear: our DITA stack is brand new and hasn't been tested in a real live scenario. We need some commercial and/or community deployments so that it can be properly tested and adapted to potential hidden use cases.

Currently the package is not yet ready to be proposed as a finalized solution to the docs team. What's more, porting all the documentation to DITA would be an enormous task, trying to do that at the same time as the D7 docs upgrade would be a really bad idea.

My current plan is to make a site hosted outside of the d.o. infrastructure where people can start playing with the tool so we can start gathering feedback. Next week we'll do a "how to install" screencast, which should get us even more feedback. We'll do a couple of these rounds to further enhance the toolset. Once we've got a tool that is slick enough we'll propose it as a candidate replacement for an improved infrastructure for the Drupal docs. But that is at least half a year in the future.

--

Check out more of my writing on our blog and my Twitter account.