Questions about documentation management

We welcome these questions and hope that the community provides good answers.

If not, then some of us will post some relevant pages that inform you.

I suggest watching drupal.org AND isp efforts in this regard...

EG: http://groups.drupal.org/node/94034

Also: webenabled.com is an isp that is very oss cms-focused.

ciao

Hi Anastasia,

Probably you'll be interested in the work we've been doing on a module that would make it possible to work with DITA, an OASIS open standard for single sourced documentation in Drupal. We have a first development release of the module over at http://drupal.org/project/dita

• What do you like about Drupal for docs? What are its strengths and weaknesses?
  The biggest strength of Drupal as a documentation solution for an open source project is that Drupal has community written all over it: your users can log in, edit, flag, tag, comment, rate and with the revision system Drupal can become much like a wiki but with forms you can design yourself.
  Our current biggest weaknesses in Drupal as a documentation tool are in my opinion: Lack of a good way to deal with differences in documentation between versions (currently we just duplicate all of our docs when there is a new release of Drupal core) and the
  proliferation of documentation topic formats (e.g. sometimes individual topics get their own page, sometimes multiple are grouped in 1 page, etc.). These weaknesses could be addressed with a single sourcing content standard such as DITA.
• How easy or hard it is to customize the look and feel of the interface with Drupal? i.e. style, layout, navigation, etc.?
  Drupal can be anything for you in terms of style (all the way from the backend to a flash site to a mobile site) and especially in the more resent versions of Drupal (6 and 7) theming has become a lot easier.
• Do you auto-generate API docs from comments in code? If so, how do you manage integration with more narrative text such as examples, tutorials, etc?
  As you can see our API docs can have comments, and through that somewhat allow for more narrative content. But besides of this and of some content references to the API docs from the Drupal documentation there is no real integration. In DITA API docs would be reference type topics, that could be included in a DITA map and through a relationship table cross-referenced from the more narative documentation (tasks and concepts).
• How do you manage versioned documentation i.e. documentation specific to numbered releases of Drupal?
  Right now the documentation is duplicated :(
• Do you have dedicated technical writers, or do the developers write the docs, or another approach?
  There are no dedicated technical writers for our project, all the work is done by volunteers.
• Do you support community input/editing of documentation? Why or why not?
  We do that's how our documentation works