Using DITA for documenting a web-based application but forced to used mediawiki
hi (and apologies for the long text - it just did not work out shorter),
i work @ a company that creates web applications for government administrations (before that we delivered client-software). this software is used by a multitude of different stakeholders and therefore demands several types of documentation. our software is very feature-rich and highly configurable, our web interfaces are complex. so we need a flexible solution for a documentation that can easily be adjusted to fit different configurations.
until today, we have been using a "naturally grown" mediawiki-system for documentation. customers are forced to leave the application, open our wiki and find their way through a huge mess of (old) documentation. we'd like to avoid that in the future and integrate our documentation in the application.
my take: implement a SSP solution based on dita, since i like the dita-approach and since it seems to fit our goals for the new documentation (online -help, expandable as needed and so on).
my "problem": for "political" reasons, i can't suggest to abandon our mediawiki-system, since it took nearly 4 years to get our employees get used to it and since mediawiki offers a very simple way of versioning support. we use a lot of open source technology and our CEO is a strong supporter of open source solutions - up to the point that we *must* use open source software, even if propriatary tools work better and would save money in the long run...
so there are just to possibilities for me:
* find technological arguments that mediawiki MUST be abandoned
* find a way to PRODUCE the documentation within the mediawiki-system.
i'm going for the second idea since a "topic-based" documentation can be achieved with wiki as well and i'm trying to create an information architecture with the needed templates.
my questions:
1. is there a possibility to transform wiki to valid dita and then back to wiki again?
2. has anyone experience in creating a complex documentation with DITA solely based on open source / free toolkits?
thanks in advance!
tk
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Is it possible to use a Software as a Service open source tool?
Hi TK,
You may have seen the announcement I posted a few weeks ago in this forum about DocZone Lite. This is a hosted application that provides XML structured authoring and single source publishing using the open source Alfresco platform.
If you are interested in finding out more, you can contact me offline.
Best regards,
-Dan
Besides the "open-source"
Besides the "open-source" argument in favor of mediawiki, why are you using it? For the search? For the comments? For the participative editing of the doc?
If you go the DITA way you will somehow loose the participative side of things (unless you publish to a comments enabled platform). If you don't care or have other means to get comments I would advocate for the Eclipse infocenter. There are already transformations available in the DITA Open Toolkit to produce documentation plugins for the Eclipse platform (and everything is OSS).
see http://dita.xml.org/wiki/setting-up-the-eclipse-help-infocenter-for-publ...
There is also a DITA-to-Wiki use-case documented here http://www.slideshare.net/lisa.dyer/lombardi-wikis-model
Hope this helps,
Claude
http://www.dita-op.org/
hi and thank you for your
hi and thank you for your quick answer. our company uses mediawiki as a "knowledge-ressource-center" - or *tries* to use ist that way, since it does not work out this way. anything is stored in there: documentation for our legacy systems (ported from word to wiki with horrible results), developer-documentation for our new software, memos, pictures, pdfs and so on, but it is a huge mess without guidelines whatsoever. our new documentation would suffer from the same problems, therefore i'd like to take the DITA-approach...
you are right: we're using mediawiki as a documentation platform because of the very easy way of collaborative working. our documentation-writers are not very skilled when it comes to create markup (like mediawiki-syntax or XML). it took nearly 4 years to get them used to mediawiki after all, so they need a wysiwyg-editor and that would cost money and would not be open source... i'm feeling like dilbert here... ;-)
i will check out your links! :-)