Jab2014 - Make Joomla! THE solution for online documentation

Make Joomla!THE solution for online
documentation
@ JandBeyond 2014

Hello
I am Nicholas (Nick) Antimisiaris
(aka nant on forums)
Member of the Community Builder team
Nant @ Joomlapolis.com
and
I LOVE Joomla!
JAB-2014 © Joomlapolis - 2014 2

This presentation is about
Something we can do
to help make Joomla better

Requirements / help form
 Reminder – this form is for people interested in exploring the
concept of using Joomla for their online documentation
needs.
goo.gl/UZ3RpY

Presentation Agenda
 The real motivation
 The Joomla marketplace
 Joomla for doc projects?
 Existing documentation tools
 Requirements analysis
 Work in progress
 Lets make Joomla a doc tool solution !

Motivation (repeating)
To help make Joomla better

But what is Joomla, really ?
 Content Management System (CMS)
 Open-source, GPL, Free to download and use
 Technology: PHP, MYSQL, Apache, etc.
 From the joomla.org site:
Joomla is an award-winning content management system
(CMS), which enables you to build Web sites and powerful
online applications.

Competition in the CMS market
www.opensourcecms.com
Making
Joomla
better

How competition define itself
 Joomla:
Joomla is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which
enables you to buildWeb sites and powerful online applications. Many
aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla the
most popularWeb site software available. Best of all, Joomla is an open
source solution that is freely available to everyone.
 Wordpress:
WordPress is web software you can use to create a beautiful website or
blog.We like to say thatWordPress is both free and priceless at
the same time.
 Drupal:
Come for the software, stay for the community
Drupal is an open source content management platform powering
millions of websites and applications. It’s built, used, and supported by an
active and diverse community of people around the world.

What some public trend sites show
Someone looking to compare CMS’s
might look at public sites that display usage trends

Usage trends (http://trends.builtwith.com/cms)

Wordpress trends (http://trends.builtwith.com/cms)
Disclaimer:
These graphs
are publicly
available and
their accuracy
cannot be
verified.
The author
does not
endorse them.

Joomla trends
Disclaimer:
These graphs
are publicly
available and
their accuracy
cannot be
verified.
The author
does not
endorse them.

Drupal trends
Disclaimer:
These graphs
are publicly
available and
their accuracy
cannot be
verified.
The author
does not
endorse them.

Agree or disagree
 Whether these stats are real or not, it doesn’t matter.
 What does matter is that we as a project understand that
they are publicly available and we need to address them.
 Joomla marketing is aware of these and is addressing them.

Real (?) targets
 John Coonen ( http://www.cmsconnection.com ) quote:
PRIMARY MARKETS OFTHE BIG 3 (there is overlap, of course,
but their big target):
 WordPress Market: End Users
 Joomla Market: Users of 3rd Party Products & Services
 Drupal Market: Developers & Digital Agencies

niche markets
 K2 powered news portals
 Joomla CLI framework, platform or whatever its called
 We need more niche market exposure
Why not documentation sites ?

Documentation dilemma
 Ask yourself:
How many Joomla projects actually use Joomla for their
online documentation?
 Why not? --- What’s missing?
 Even better:
Does the Joomla project use Joomla for its online
documentation?
 Why not?
 Slightly off-topic:
Why doesn’t Joomla use Kunena to power its forums?
 If there are features missing we can add them!

Joomlapolis experience
 CB Documentation
 MS Word  PDF
 Pros: easy to create great content
 Cons: manual release process, versioning wows
 CBSubs Documentation
 MS Word  PDF
 Tutorials
 Joomla articles
 Pros: easy to create using better editor (JCE)
 Cons: no versioning (prior to J3.2), no commenting

Our long list requirements
 Online
 Pay-wall
 Versioning
 Source control
 Commenting
 Tagging
 References
 Cross referencing
 PDF generation
 Multiple authors /
Collaboration
 Localization
 Exporting to other formats
 Table of contents
 Table of figures
 Glossary
 Flexible layouts
 Social sharing
 Contributions / workflows

Some existing general solutions
 Wiki based solutions
 Alfresco
 Liferay
 Calenco
 XML-based tools
 Confluence (not open-source)
 MadCap (not open-source)

Guess what?
It appears that there is no defacto solution for
general documentation projects

Strategic decision
Use Joomla for our documentation projects
Identify must-haves and nice-to-haves
Prioritize missing features
Contribute, develop, push for improvements

Must-have features – Joomla functionality
Must-have feature Initial Joomla functionality
WYSIWYG editor Default editors or even better JCE
Online presentation Article layouts
Flexible Menu generation from cat tree Third party?
PDF generation Third party?
Table of contents Category listings
Versioning Article versioning
Pay-wall Integration with CBSubs
Tagging Joomla Tags
Commenting Third-party solutions ?
Social sharing Third-party solutions ?
Cross referencing Joomla Tags ?

High priority nice-to-have
Nice-to-have feature Solution
Collaboration Joomla ACL ?
Localization Joomla Language support ?
Source control integration ?
Exporting to other formats ?
Contributions workflow Joomla article submission workflow?
Table of figures ?
Glossary ?

What are your needs ?
 To help make Joomla a better tool for documentation
projects please complete this form:
goo.gl/UZ3RpY

WIP: Content category structure

More
WIP: Articles

More
Default Joomla look

More
Experimenting with third-party ext.

Way forward
 Need to form an informal team of Joomla users interested in
exploring the use of Joomla for their online documentation
needs
 Need to identify (if possible) or develop:
 Menu generation tool from content category tree
 Commenting solution
 Social sharing solution
 PDF export for content category tree
 Whatever else informal team deems appropriate

Lets work together!
 To help make Joomla a better tool for documentation
projects please complete this form:
goo.gl/UZ3RpY

Jab2014 - Make Joomla! THE solution for online documentation

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