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 SourceOpen InnovationDistributions-SAAS

Structured docsMulti-formatTraining

DITA

Drupal

Technology

Community

CraftsmanshipDIY usersEnterprise

ConsultantsDocumentation writers Vendors

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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 distributionsIntranets (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)...




DITA

Drupal

Technology

Community



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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




DITA

Drupal

Technology

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Drupal's own Documentation

The good

Community

A lot of pretty good documentation

Organic adaptive documentation structureDrupal.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




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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 documentationDITA maps

Conditional text

Conrefs

Topic based documentation

Ecosystem of documentation tools & services

More documentation writers




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All that for a community of
> 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




DITA

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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 foldersAutomatic 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



DITA

Drupal

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Community



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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



DITA

Drupal

Technology

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DITA

Drupal

Technology

Community



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Twitter

@kvantommeLinkedIn

be.linkedin.com/in/kvantomme

[email protected]




DITA

Drupal

Technology

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LEVERAGING COMMUNITIES

DITA in the Open Source CMS Drupal - Baltimore 2011

Technology

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