Our vision
Our vision is to see Drupal becoming a full-featured and viable platform for the tech comm sector.
We have organized to:
- Discuss the needs of the technical communication sector and the business case for adopting Drupal as a tech comm CMS
- Share experiences and technical ideas about publishing technical information (manuals, help docs) on Drupal.
- Explore how Drupal can be useful to tech communicators who are utilizing DITA for structured content authoring.
The road to Drupal 8
It's been quite some time since my last post. Mainly that's because I've been looking at Drupal 8 and how to implement DITA integration with Drupal 8.
Unfortunately, the Import HTML module I've used for importing will not be ported to Drupal 8 any time soon. And the Feeds module, another likely candidate for importing XML, is in a similar state.
But I've just stumbled across the following blog post by Campbell Vertesi about using Migrate which looks quite promissing: "Stop Waiting for Feeds Module: How to Import RSS in Drupal 8"
So stay tuned.
Frank
Drupal, REST and XML
I've stumbled across some older, but still very interesting articles by Kurt Cagle regarding combining Drupal and XML technologies:
- Drupal as Open Architecture
- XProc: Drupal, XML Pipelines and RESTful Services
- http://news.oreilly.com/kurt-cagle/
- http://www.xmltoday.org
- http://semanticmodeling.blogspot.com
Integrating external data into Drupal
Here's a number of articles on integrating external and remote data into Drupal, especially via Apache Solr.
Read moreSample DITA content
Thanks to the pointers by DITAWriter Keith Schengili-Roberts at http://www.ditawriter.com/sample-dita-files-to-play-with/, here are some resources for larger sets of DITA content for testing and development:
- Apache Derby DITA documentation: http://db.apache.org/derby/manuals/dita.html
- DITA Gutenberg samples: http://sourceforge.net/p/dita2indesign/code/HEAD/tree/trunk/dita_gutenbe...
Tech comm, elearning and DITA
I'm interested in Drupal, DITA and elearning. And in building a Drupal Learning Content Component Management System (LCCMS). Structured authoring is a great fit for elearning as well as tech comm. There is also a DITA standard for elearning. Much of the functionality for Drupal DITA tech comm CMS would be directly applicable to elearning, like single source authoring, content re-use, multi-channel publishing.
One key difference is that elearning relies much more heavily on interactivity and rich media elements.
Read moreImport DITA with "Import HTML" module
Hi,
I've successfully imported the "Growing Flowers" example from the DITA sample files that come with oXygen using the DITA XHTML to Simple HTML XSLT template. The DITA XML files have been transformed to XHTML for importing.
http://dita.nakohdo.de/topics/flowers/gerbera.html
Detailed instructions will follow.
Frank
Read moreModelling arbitrary XML in Drupal
A week ago I wrote a post here about how we could build a DITA CCMS in Drupal, I've now written a full blogpost about it, with a screencast that explains how it could work. You can check it on our blog, it's titled A free and open source DITA CCMS
Read moreDrupal as a DITA CCMS, the Drupal way
At Drupalcamp Cluj in Romania I got really excited again about the possibility for building a CCMS (component content management system) in Drupal.
Ages ago when we did our first experiments with DITA in Drupal this was our goal. We did a prototype for a tool that was able to do single pass transformations of topics, allowed you to manage DITA maps in a mindmap and that had a form for creating DITA topics.
Read moreDITA-OT to Markdown plugin announced
Today on the Yahoo DITA group, Jarno Elovirta announced the release of a markdown DITA-OT plugin. The plug-in adds support for consuming and producing Markdown with DITA-OT. See https://github.com/jelovirt/dita-ot-markdown for more information.for more information.
Read moreDITA - One Success Story to Share
I’d like to share a recent project with you that I think may provide a solution to problems you’re facing in publishing tech comm content using Drupal. This is my first post on Drupal.org after registering two days ago, so bear with me as I tell you the [somewhat long] story of how I used Drupal to solve the problem of publishing technical documentation online.
Read moreDITA Publishing on Drupal
Per gippy's request, I started this thread.
Working as a Technical Writer in a software company, I am responsible for publishing documentation on Drupal. There is a need to shift from PDF publishing to online publishing on Drupal.
After doing careful research on Drupal.org, I found the Import HTML module. Since we author on FrameMaker DITA authoring tool, a list of DITA files are created. To be able to import, we convert the DITA files to XHTML using DITA-OT. This process is straightforward.
Read moreSuggestion: Put DITA in titles
When you create a Wiki page, Discussion, etc. in this group, please put DITA in the title. Thanks!
Reasons:
- SEO (search engine optimization) so people will get these pages if they search for DITA Drupal or something like that on Drupal.org or Google or whatever.
- Understanding what is in search results - most search results pages show titles and maybe a short excerpt, so having a meaningful title like "Useful modules for DITA" as opposed to just "Useful modules" is important.
DITA CMS: Implementation questions and decisions
Last updated by Frank Ralf on Mon, 2015-03-02 17:19
Questions and decisions regarding the Drupal implementation of DITA.
Read moreDITA CMS: Relevant Drupal modules
Last updated by Frank Ralf on Mon, 2015-03-02 17:18
List of Drupal modules that might be relevant for the implementation of Drupal as a DITA CMS.
Read moreArticles and discussions on DITA for the web
Last updated by Frank Ralf on Fri, 2015-02-27 14:32
Blog articles and discussions on DITA for the web.
Read moreDITA Publishing with Drupal - Roadmap
Hi,
I've already collected some ideas at "The future of DITA integration for Drupal" and set up a Trello board for collaborating on this project. I'd suggest me move the content over to this group as wiki pages.
Kind regards,
Frank
OASIS DITA TC: RFP for dita.xml.org site (currently Drupal-based)
Hi,
the OASIS DITA technical committees have published a RFP for their official website "to put more DITA in dita.xml.org". The site is currently powered by Drupal (6?).
"The Drupal implementation for dita.xml.org has been a long-standing source of pain, and we want to redo the site in early 2015," they write. Shouldn't that be a challenge for the Drupal community and/or some of the larger Drupal companies to prove them wrong?
Read moreAsciiDoc tool chain integration with Drupal
Not being a DITA expert, I'm not sure if the AsciiDoc tool chain can be used for DITA per se, but it is useful for technical documentation in general. So it may be of interest to some people in this group that I have created a "sandbox" module on Drupal.org that does some AsciiDoc integration with Drupal.
Current functionality:
Read moreThe Business Case For Drupal as a DITA/Tech Comm CMS
DITA ON DRUPAL
Extending Drupal’s leadership in media publishing to the field of technical communication
TARGET:
To foster the development of features in Drupal so that tech comm shops ($1B USD market) who want to publish to Drupal can do so without encountering major hurdles.
Read more