!!! NOTE: This document is a summary of CocoonDocumentationSystem and maintained by ReinhardPoetz. Please add your comments there !!!

Motivation (or problems I want to solve)

  • make writing docs as simple as possible
  • separation between global docs (docs about the project) and user docs
  • evaluate the existing docs (no automatic doc import into new repositories)
  • enable comments for doc
  • have a modular architecture (having a repository and webspace should be enough to run, other features should be "pluggable")

I don't think that a technical solution will directly lead to better docs. I just think that making the doc authoring process easier will invite much more people to help out.

Architecture

Overview

    +------------------+              +------------------+
    |SVN REPOSITORY    |              |  COCOON WEBSITE  |
    | +--------------+ |period. update| +--------------+ |
    | |global docs   |-+--------------+>|/             |-|----+
    | +--------------+ |              | +--------------+ |    |
    | +--------------+ |period. update| +--------------+ |    |
    | |2.3 docs      |-+--------------+>|/2.3          |-|----+
    | +--------------+ |              | +--------------+ |    |
    | +--------------+ |              | +--------------+ |    |
    | |2.2 docs      |-+--------------+>|/2.3          |-|----+
    | +--------------+ |              | +--------------+ |    |
 +->| +--------------+ |              |                  |    |
 |  | |...           | |              |                  |----+
 |  | +--------------+ |              |                  |    |
 |  +------------------+              +------------------+    |
 |                                                            |
 |                                                            |
 |         +---------------+                                  |
 |         |WEB APPLICATION|                +-------------+   |
 |         |               |  redirect to   | unique edit |   |
 |         | - edit        |<---------------|    link     |<--+
 +-------->| - comment     |                +-------------+
 update &  | - approve     |   ,---.
  commit   | - report      |  /     \
           |               | / local \
           |               |( tempor. )
           +---------------+ \ repos /
                              \     /
                               `---'

The center of the new architecture is SVN. SVN contains all Forrest repositores. For the first, these are[1]:

  • 2.2 docs
  • global docs

These repositores are periodicially published using some kind of automatism (cron, forrestbot)

Let's look at the structure of the website:

http://cocoon.apache.org ................... contains the global docs
http://cocoon.apache.org/2.2/............... contains the periodically (e.g. every 6 hours)
                                             published docs

The "living docs" docs that are periodically published out of the current repositories contain an "edit" and a "comment" link. This link is redirected to a web application where authors can write new docs or comments, e.g.

http://cocoon.apache.org/edit/2.2/23.html --> http://someapacheserver.apache.org/webedit/edit/cocoon/2.2/23.html

http://cocoon.apache.org/comment/2.2/23.html --> http://someapacheserver.apache.org/webedit/comment/cocoon/2.2/23.html

The web application at http://someapacheserver.apache.org/webedit/ has following features:

  • edit a document e.g. document 2.2/23.html (everybody)
  • save the modified document in a local repository (everybody)
  • commit the document to SVN (committers only)
  • get a list of all locally available versions and the latest SVN version
    of a document so that the author can select from which version he wants to start
    (everybody)
  • add a comment to a document (everybody)
  • commit the comment to SVN (committers only)
  • send mails to docs@cocoon.apache.org when a new doc or comment has been written
  • make site.xml editable using a nested list of <ul> (committers only)
  • user management (committers only)
  • report: list of all modified/new docs and comments available

The implementation of this mini CMS could be done based on

  • Daisy
  • Hippo CMS (if it is OS licensed in the meantime)
  • Apache Lenya
  • Forrest
  • Gianugo's little CMS
  • write my own

Document format

I propose the format that the default configuration of the HTMLCleaningConvertor generates. What is good enough for Daisy should work as well for us (wink) Alternativly we can use plain HTML4. This would have the advantage that the document can be edited using any HTML editor.

In the repository, each document consists of a directory, which can contain following files:

 ./content_en.xml ........................ content as cleaned XML
 ./content_en.html ....................... the content as HTML (only content_en.xml OR content_en.html are allowed)
 ./content_de.xml ........................ content in German
 ./meta.xml .............................. contains meta information (date, authors, status, target audience, keywords)
 ./comments_en.xml ....................... contains user comments in English
 ./comments_de.xml ....................... contains the user ccomments on the German version
 ./files/ ................................ contains all images and attachements

Note: Having the language postfix gives the chance to provide translations. For the first we concentrate on English documents.

Document identifiers

  • use of Wiki-style names
  • flat structure (the structure of the docs is not the concern of the repository)

Forrest repositories

See http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/cocoon/whiteboard/doc-repos/ for two examples that work with the latest SVN version of Forrest 0.6.

Published docs

22NewDocumentsGeneration shows where the current version of the docs is available.

What do we have to do?

Step by Step

The good news is that we don't need all the features at once. We can go the path to better docs and a better documentation system step by step:

  • Step1: Setup Forrest Repositories (Reinhard: DONE)
  • Step2: Initial content
    • find a new structure (Upayavira and Reinhard: DONE)
    • evaluate good docs and move them into the new repository !!! more volunteers needed !!!
    • integrate auto-generated docs (n.n.)
  • Step2: enable the periodically running jobs that publish repositories
  • Step3: work on the web application and have a demo running on brutus.apache.org
    • component that reads from and committs to SVN (infos provided by Jeremy)
    • do the SSL setup of Apache (n.n.)
  • Step4: move the demo application over to Apache infrastructure
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