Clay Leeds wrote: > Sounds good to me. > > Having never played around with Forrest, I'd like a little help getting > up to speed. Victor (et al), could you give me any pointers or links to > things I should pay attention to in building this? In particular, tips > on how to get started, as well as any links that will help get me on my > way (such as FOP's site.xml in CVS, and any other such links), as well > as perhaps showing me (if you know) how to change one of the sections > and/or links, I'll do what it takes to extrapolate that to the rest of > the site.
I haven't gone to the trouble of becoming an expert, but kind of follow a "need to know" approach -- if I need to know, I'll go find out. The basics are documented at: http://xml.apache.org/fop/dev/doc.html which you may want to supplement as you learn more. Other general things: 1. Forrest uses Apache Cocoon for its processing, so a rudimentary understanding of Cocoon is very helpful. I purchased Mozcar & Aston's "Cocoon Developer's Handbook", which was of some help. 2. The big gotcha on the FOP site is compliance.xml, which requires (AFAICT) a custom processing step as it uses a specialized DTD, its own stylesheet etc. 3. One of the things we had asked for was a site-wide way of describing the FOP web site, especially one that was not directory-structure dependent. I think they have implemented this, and I think that is what Jeff is referring to in his email. The main benefit to us is that we should be able to rearrange our web site doc without having to move files around as much. 4. The last time I used it (circa January), the Forrest web site assumed that I knew more than I did, and it was of limited use to me. This was partly because things are changing on that project pretty fast. It may be much better now, I just don't know. The good news is that they give excellent support & you will probably want to join the mailing list for that purpose. 5. Our doc is generated by forrestbot, which is essentially a snapshot of Forrest that is set up to run automatically on the Apache server(s). See the above link for more details. You will not ordinarily need to work with a copy of Forrest on your local machine. (Christian probably has to for creating the release documentation). 6. I probably know more than I am telling here, but that is all I can think of ATM. Feel free to ask specific questions if you have them. > I've taken a gander at http://xml.apache.org/forrest/changes.html for > some ideas, and that's helpful. I'll also spend some time going through > their docs. BTW, I notice that 0.5 is still unreleased... Anyway, I'd be > happy to check some of this stuff out... The key thing here is that forrestbot is using a 0.5 release candidate, and forrestbot is what drives our concerns. > Web Maestro Clay > > p.s. I'll be going to Kaua'i for my birthday (at the end of next > week--lucky me!) Hopefully I'll be far along in the process by then... ;-p AFAIK, there is no rush. Thanks for jumping in to help here. Victor Mote
