Please read http://www.apache.org/dev/cms.html if you are looking for alternatives to confluence.
You are free of course to choose any documentation standard you wish, in my experience writing XML really is painful. The Apache CMS uses markdown as their templating language, and that is much better suited for writing content than XML. Note that infrastructure probably will move everyone away from confluence (at least for the website maintenance) in due time. I'm not sure if infrastructure will come up with an alternative to confluence for the wiki part. Martijn On Mon, Nov 15, 2010 at 4:54 PM, Michael Fitzner <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi guys, > A major part of the Etch documentation takes place inside Confluence Wiki at > the moment. We see some disadvantages for doing so and would like to start to > improve the Etch documentation. Some points which we would like to address: > > -One documentation base (XML) > > -Providing different output formats like PDF for storing and printing, HTML > for online documentation > > -Customization of output should be possible > > -Continuous development of documentation and versioning of it (etc. with SVN) > > -Release management for documentation > > -Documentation-Patches that are easy to provide > > -Distributed development of documentation > > > Our proposal to fulfill all these requirements; is using the docbook > (http://www.docbook.org/) format and its default toolchain like xslt, fo etc. > To give you an expression how it could looks like, we have created a > Jira-Issue [ETCH-115<https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/ETCH-115>] with a > basic docbook documentation skeleton for etch, a Makefile for creating PDF > and HTML output and some resources like xslt stylesheets. It is possible to > recreate the documentation on a linux based system (for windows some Makefile > adjustments are still necessary, but it should also work) > > The complete Etch documentation could be stored inside SVN and all guys are > able to work on it and provide patches. When the documentation has reached a > certain quality it would be time to do an extract and publish this one to our > website (HTML + PDF Version). > > If we plan to change our Website to Apache Forrest in future, we will still > able to process the docbook format with Forrest (this is supported by Apache > Forrest). > > If all like it; we would start to add the documentation artifacts to SVN and > begin writing documentation. Feedback is welcome. > > Thanks > Michael > > -- Become a Wicket expert, learn from the best: http://wicketinaction.com
