Docs CMS Idea

[David Nalley]

On Sun, Jun 27, 2010 at 4:57 AM, Justin Clift <justin at salasaga.org> wrote:
> On 06/27/2010 10:01 AM, Ruediger Landmann wrote:
> <snip>
>>> It just seems so much more attractive to me to use a Publican front-end
>>> called "Publican" than to have to start GEdit, turn on Publican mode,
>>> and still have to use external applications to preview my work, or to
>>> get help.
>>
>> Ryan Lerch is working on a graphical front-end to Publican called
>> "Endoculator" that might provide most of the workflow you're
>> describing.[5] It's still under heavy development though, and is not yet
>> packaged.
>
> As a question out of left field, has anyone in the docs team looked at
> using Confluence + Scroll Wiki Exporter?
>
>   http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/
>   http://www.scrollyourwiki.com/display/web/Scroll+Wiki+Exporter
>
> I've used Confluence in organisations before, and it's best of breed for
> Wiki software.  It also supports direct editing of wiki pages through
> OpenOffice and MS Word, which is *brilliant* for people used to using a
> word processor!
>
> The Scroll Wiki Exporter plug-in for it exports the content to DocBook
> v5 and/or DITA, which Publican could (in theory) then build/publish.
> The Scroll Wiki Exporter plug-in seems to get high marks/good reviews,
> so thinking it might actually be a go-er.
>
> I keep thinking I should set up an demo on a server and see if it
> actually works in practise, but I'm not sure if anyone is actually
> interested enough to have a look. :)


I don't believe either is open source, and thus we can't use them.
(Yes, I know Atlassian will grant a free as in price license for their
products to Open Source Software projects, but it's still not free as
in freedom) With Freedom being one of our foundations, we make a stand
that the software (and documentation) we ship, and anything that we
use to ship it with is available under a free as in libre license. In
addition to making it easier to follow along in our footsteps for
other people who want to mirror our workflow, we think it advances the
state of free software. If you saw the number of bugs filed (and
fixed) by and on behalf of Docs Project team members against Publican
in a single release cycle, you'd immediately see at least one reason
why.