Hi Taher
It's great that this conversation has started again. It would be great
to actually start to do something about the integrated help system
within OFBiz itself. We have found limitations with the docbook
implementation we have, so now have a better idea of what we want to
achieve.
In the past we've talked a lot about DITA but to me it seemed a lot more
complex to understand, structure and generally get started. I've briefly
played about with Ascidoc and it seems pretty simple enough to get the
hang of and that to me is an important thing. I also like the idea of
being able to render multiple formats (and it would be good to make them
look nicer and easier to read).
Getting a good and functioning help framework into our codebase is long
overdue and I'm sure will add some great benefits and also encourage
documentation contributions from our community.
Big +1 from me!
Thanks
Sharan
On 17/10/17 10:01, Taher Alkhateeb wrote:
Hello Folks,
We've had this discussion multiple times in the past, but I think I
have a more concrete idea this time for solving this problem. In the
past few weeks we've been working internally in Pythys to figure out
the best way to write and distribute documentation, and I think most
of that is applicable to OFBiz.
In a nutshell, here is the idea (practically) for how to proceed:
- The documentation language to use is Asciidoc
- The documentation tool is Asciidoctor
- Publishing happens through Gradle using the asciidoctor gradle
plugin (not the OFBiz framework or anything else).
- The only place where we write documentation is inside the code base
- Every component contains its own documentation
- General documentation goes to either a standalone directory or a
generic component like common or base
- As much as possible, documentation files are small and focused on
one topic. And then other longer documents are constructed from these
snippets of documentation.
- We publish to all formats including PDF for users, or HTML for
embedded help and wiki pages. So OFBiz does not parse docbook for its
help system, instead it just renders generated HTML.
As I've worked extensively with Asciidoc I find it easy to pickup
(like markdown) but also modular (like docbook and dita). It's also
neat that you can sprinkle variables all around in your document so
that update is no longer a painful grepping process.
Would love to hear your thoughts on this.
Cheers,
Taher Alkhateeb
