DITA in the Open Source CMS Drupal - Baltimore 2011

Doing DITA in the Open Source CMS Drupal Kristof Van Tomme, Pronovix CMS/DITA N-America, April 4-6, 2011, Baltimore, Maryland

Kristof Van Tomme Belgian Bio-engineer Pronovix Drupal architect Entrepreneur PM of the Drupal Association Hungarian connection Techno-optimist Biotech Drupal evangelist Husband and Father Strategist CEO

More than technology Open Source Open Innovation Distributions-SAAS Structured docs Multi-format Training DITA Drupal Technology Community Craftsmanship DIY users Enterprise Consultants Documentation writers Vendors ?

What is drupal?

Drupal sites you might know

Drupal is really good in
Breaking vendor lock-in
Communities
Cutting edge technology
Open innovation
Collaborative development
Empowering self-learning individuals

Drupal is really good in
Breaking vendor lock-in
Communities
Cutting edge technology
Open innovation
Collaborative development
Empowering self-learning individuals
OPEN

Drupal is a platform
Open source (GPL)
Drupal core
Modules
Features (apps)
Themes
Distributions
Illustration by developmentseed.org when introducing the features module

One platform to rule them all
Drupal has a fast growing number of distributions
Intranets (Open Atrium)
Collaborative market intelligence (Managing News)
Customer community platform (Drupal Commons)
Governments (Open Public)
Publishing companies (Open Publish)
Recruitment (e-recruiter)
Software as a Service (Aegir + any of the above)
...

Drupal is a grassroots community “ Come for the code, stay for the community

But Drupal is also
A fast maturing software industry
A vast network of service providers
A fast expanding library of handbooks
A network of trainers
Used in the biggest enterprise deployments
Venture backed professional support companies

Drupal's own Documentation

The good
Community
A lot of pretty good documentation
Organic adaptive documentation structure
Drupal.org docs
API.d.o
help in drupal core
issue queue
groups.drupal.org
blogs

The bad
Very few regularly contribute to the official docs
No reuse between documentation types
Documentation is split between resources
Hard to enforce standards
A given documentation page is written for a single audience type
Issues with version specific documentation

Combining Drupal & DITA

What Drupal brings to DITA
An open source option
Interoperability
Extensibility
Human friendly metadata handling
Game dynamics (user points)
social graph (Facebook integration)
Community tools (those web 2.0 things)
RDFa (those web 3.0 things)

What Drupal brings to DITA
An open source option
Interoperability
Extensibility
Human friendly metadata handling
Game dynamics (user points)
social graph (Facebook integration)
Community tools (those web 2.0 things)
RDFa (those web 3.0 things)
CUTTING EDGE

What Drupal needs from DITA
Best practices for single source documentation
DITA maps
Conditional text
Conrefs
Topic based documentation
Ecosystem of documentation tools & services
More documentation writers

All that for a community of > ½ Million users

The problem is...

Mere mortals don't write XML

Drupal had/has a similar problem

Crossing the chasm http://www.exampler.com/testing-com/writings/reviews/moore-chasm.html DRUPAL

The long tail of documentation http://blogs.idc.com/ie/?p=53

The long tail of documentation HOW DO DITA x 5?

How do DITA x 5 http://www.archive.org/details/drupalconchi_day3_keynote_jared_spool $ Need a cheap step in solution Usability

Words are silver, code is gold

Drupal DITA forms
Use friendly flexible UI to create documentation forms
Store in Drupal, export in DITA
Currently implemented for tasks and concepts

Drupal DITA forms

Drupal DITA form builder (CCK)

Import existing documentation
Upload individual files
Import folders
Automatic checkout from a version controlled documentation repository
Drupal checks for updates
Other import options can be tailored for specific use cases to plug into existing processes

Folder importer

User driven assembly and export
Bookmark relevant documentation topics
Create a new DITA map in the GUI
Export the map and the topics it contains

Ditamaps as mindmaps

Add content with Views queries

Ditamaps as mindmaps

Export with Open Toolkit

You can download this for free at http://drupal.org/project/dita

Future Vision DITA in Drupal
Metadata integration
DITA form to DITA XML Graphical UI
Authoring memory
Conref library
WYSIWYG or markup
1 or more distributions:
Documentation distribution
DITA distribution

A toolbox with 6000+ free modules CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 by libertyandvigilance http://www.flickr.com/photos/10459273@N05/3935251879/sizes/z/in/photostream/ 8800+

Our business = help you realize Open Source Open Innovation Distributions-SAAS Structured docs Multi-format Training DITA Drupal Technology Community Craftsmanship DIY users Enterprise Consultants Documentation writers Vendors ?!

Future Vision for Drupal Docs
Documentation becomes a modular patchable unit, that is used to build project documentation
Everyone contributes to documentation
A new niche grows in our community for technical writers
Projects can be documented from a Fingerprint (XML settings dump)

Invitation to join our community

Community portal for DITA Open Source Open Innovation Distributions-SAAS Structured docs Multi-format Training DITA Drupal Technology Community Craftsmanship DIY users Enterprise Consultants Documentation writers Vendors ?

Twitter @kvantomme LinkedIn be.linkedin.com/in/kvantomme [email_address]

http://pronovix.com	311
http://www.pronovix.com	134
http://apostatical.rssing.com	4
http://ams.activemailservice.com	3
http://website_v1_prod.dev.dh-te.com	1
http://website_v2_dev.dev.dh-te.com	1
http://www.online-home-jobs.com	1
url_unknown	1
http://translate.googleusercontent.com	1
http://www.slideshare.net	1
http://drupal.org	1
http://paper.li	1

DITA in the Open Source CMS Drupal - Baltimore 2011

by Kristof Van Tomme

Accessibility

Categories

Upload Details

Usage Rights

12 Embeds 460

Statistics

DITA in the Open Source CMS Drupal - Baltimore 2011 Presentation Transcript