PRONOVIX

Evolving web sites

RDFa

Documentation in DITA in the Open Source CMS Drupal: presentation from CMS/DITA N-America in Baltimore

2011, April 14 - 22:05
Kristof Van Tomme

Last week I attended Content Management Strategies/DITA N-America, afaik the leading conference in the DITA community. The conference with 300 participants reminded me a lot of my first Drupalcon in Brussels, there are some obvious differences (e.g. most attendees are not programmers but technical writers, the food was as good as the food we got on the Drupal Gov Days) but if you look closer you'll see that the DITA community has a sharing culture much like our own.

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Drupaldevdays session: Documenting (in) Drupal, the next generation - leveraging DITA, RDFa, fingerprints and mindmaps

2011, February 9 - 00:50
Kristof Van Tomme

This is a presentation that I gave at the Drupal Developer Days, on 6 February 2011. It's meant as an introduction to single sourcing. It contains the results of the documentation questionnaire we ran.

What would the ideal documentation system for a community driven project like Drupal look like?

From the outside Drupal is perceived as a well documented project, and several people choose to work with Drupal because of this. On the inside however, a lot of people complain about the documentation. What's the reason and the meaning of these differences in perception?

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Technologies for an improved infrastructure for Drupal's documentation

2010, November 28 - 16:20
Kristof Van Tomme

This is a crosspost of the wiki I create at http://groups.drupal.org/node/109119

In February LeeHunter posted his wish list of features for "an awesome technical communication CMS". I've copied his list and processed the comments in the discussion and some of my own, and added our current status implementing these features and ideas of how any missing features could be implemented in the near future.

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DITA documentation distro specification Part II: A quicksilver-like RDFa editor

2010, August 25 - 10:48
Kristof Van Tomme

Introduction

If we want to make it as easy as possible to edit the DITA documentation we need to make it easier and as fool proof as possible.

We previously implemented a WYSIWYG editor for RDFa in Drupal, which basically made it possible to add custom tags around selected text. The classic WYSIWYG editor however had a couple of downsides when used for this purpose:

  • Limited set of markup that starts being unaccessible once there are more than 10 properties
  • Intuitiveness of what is where in the RDFa subject predicate object model
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DITA documentation distro specification Part I: Architecture and Storage

2010, August 19 - 09:11
Kristof Van Tomme

The following is a part of a first proposal for the specification of the Documentation system we want to build as part of the modulecraft project. It is by no means complete, and it strongly needs your feedback. This is our first encounter with DITA and our ideas should really be proof checked by technical writers that have extensive experience using DITA. The actual specification is being built as a wiki at groups.drupal.org.

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RDF Semantic Web is working and it could be running on Drupal - or also: we need more researchers!

2010, July 31 - 23:52
Kristof Van Tomme

Tonight a tweet from Laura Scott lead me to a blogpost by Zack Rosen at Semantic Focus. From the first sentence it seemed a bit odd, it's been more than 12 years since Tim Berners-Lee started working on the Semantic Web and most if not all of the points that followed seemed outdated.

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Alpha 1 Knowledge management for Open Atrium, test it now!

2010, February 19 - 21:58
Kristof Van Tomme
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We've blogged before about the Knowledge management feature package that Pronovix developed for Open Atrium. To make it really easy for you to test out the features, we made a tarball that contains an installation profile that by default will enable all the knowledge management goodness:

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Knowledge managment in Open Atrium: our feature stack

2009, November 25 - 00:55
Kristof Van Tomme
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Ever since Open Atrium went public we've been working on integrating our knowledge management features into it. Yesterday we cleared the final hurdle to get our stack into beta. In this screencast you'll see the following features/modules in action:

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Spezzle: Drupal specifications that require less coding

2009, July 10 - 08:19
Kristof Van Tomme
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Imagine: you are doing a project for a customer who doesn't know Drupal. Even before she contacted you, she made a bunch of wireframes and detailed specifications. That's a dream case right? Just one problem, all the user interfaces and features are just a little bit different from the way things are done in Drupal. This is one of the problems we want to address with Spezzle.

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Using RDFa to mark-up features in specifications for websites

2009, February 24 - 10:50
Kristof Van Tomme

If you ever wrote a specification, you've come across the following problem: Once you finally built your spec you need to cut it into feature-tickets, spec units that you can properly follow in your project management system. This basically duplicates your information, in a fluent text and a ticket version. It's a lot of extra work and worst of all it disconnects your specification from your project management system.

In most cases this means that from that point on, the written document is dead: the fluid text version will never be rewritten. A recipe for a communication disaster.

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