See also CocoonDocsDrafts for "rules" about how to work on this document.
Shamelessly inspired from the Forrest Primer - thanks StevenNoels!
The aim is to write a simpler introduction to Cocoon than the current Concepts document, which is fairly technical. This primer is targeted to users, to help them in learning the bare minimum that they need to use Cocoon for a specific task.
Make easy things easy. Hard things will be hard enough. – My dog Chips, while attempting to chop a bone.
Here's the draft document. Italics show what I intent to write, feel free to comment on this of course.
History
Copy/rewrite what we already have
What is Cocoon
Stefano Mazzocchi: XML glue for your serving needs (*)
That's a hard one at the moment I think, we must be careful not to overwhelm beginners here
MichaelTiffany
How about: Apache Cocoon is a Java Servlet. Apache Cocoon takes an XML source as its input, transforms the input information through XSLT, and then outputs the results of the transformation in any number of supported formats, such as; HTML, PDF, WAP, VRML, RTF, to name just a few. That seems like a simple enough opening... It says what Cocoon is and what it does.
MattRobinson
I think a more 'Business-Like' salesy approach is better:
Apache Cocoon is a highly adaptable, comprehensive JAVA framework for building full-featured websites suitable for any business need. Cocoon helps you to make use of current and latest standards such as XML, XSLT, HTML, XHTML, PDF, WAP and VRML (and many others) to keep your online presence up-to-date with the market leaders.
Cocoon includes Separation Of Concerns (SoF) technology, which let's you separate parts of your site so that development and management roles may be done by different people or teams.
The basic framework of Cocoon (the sitemap) is very consistent with the website design process (the way we think when we design our web sites) and so your Site Administrator will find it intuitive to keep your on-line presence trouble-free.
Waddayathink?
Cocoon roles
XML publishing in different formats, database front-ends, forms, application flow, etc...
Installing Cocoon
Point to existing docs, are they good enough?
Getting started
Point to the Cocoon website version of DocumentationTracksProject?
Reference information
Links to relevant entry points
Where we are headed
Future, rough release plans
How you can help
Coding, testing, docs, "marketing"