msgbartop
The Open Source DITA Authoring Platform
msgbarbottom

14 Mar 09 Interview with Sean Healy about the DITA-OP

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed, subscribe by Email or follow us on Twitter.
Thanks for visiting!

Some time ago I have been contacted by Sean Healy, owner of Wild Bassin Media and editor at the DITA & XML Community of the Rockies, to do an interview about this project. Three weeks ago we finally made it and the podcast is now online.

It was my first time but Sean has been very nice to me. In the first part we talk about the history and the future of the DITA-OP and DITA and there will be a second podcast discussing cloud computing and social networks (other things I am currently working on).

Hope you will find it interresting :)

Tags: , , ,

16 Feb 09 Managing support

I noticed some of you are using comments here to ask for support. I admit this is convenient, however there are several drawbacks to this approach.

  • Sourceforge does not allow Wordpress to send emails, thus I am not notified when you post a comment. I check the comments from time to time but if you need quick help it may take some time.
  • When I reply to you in the comment thread you don’t get notified, you must come back to see if I replied.
  • Comments cannot be searched, thus if you have an issue you cannot search if there is already an answer.

Instead, Sourceforge is offering “trackers” that have all needed properties for a good management of support requests (and bug and feature requests), the tracker for the DITA-OP Support Requests is at this address: http://sourceforge.net/tracker2/?atid=1074049&group_id=228491.

While comments are still possible on posts, I disabled them on pages.

Thanks for using the tracker.
Claude

Tags: , ,

01 Jan 09 M2 Announcement

This post to announce that milestone 2 of the DITA Open Platform is now released.

Starting with this milestone the Platform has two main components, the Editor and the EasyTrac package.

The Editor has some bug fixes and minor improvements (like the ability to choose which version of the DITA specifications to use) but what is really new is the EasyTrac package.

The EasyTrac package contains a pre-configured Apache2 server used to run the Trac project management system and Subversion repositories under the Windows operating system. Using those tools you can:

  • share knowledge with the wiki,
  • manage your authoring process using tickets and milestones and
  • manage your content using Subversion.

With Trac comes also the Bitten continuous integration plugin with support to automate the build of your documentation using the DITA Open Toolkit.

You will find anything necessary to get you started in the documentation section of this site.

Support will be provided using the SourceForge Support Requests tracker or the Yahoo! dita-users mailing list.

Happy new year to everyone!
Claude

08 Dec 08 DITA for Wordpress

A few days ago I released the DITA-OT and the Wordpress plugins that enable me to publish part of the (almost inexistant) DITA-OP documentation on this blog. I am talking about the About, Download and Getting Started pages that appear in the menu up here.

The DITA-OT plugin transforms a map into a single file, suitable for publication, and automatically call the xmlrpc API of the blog to publish it.

The DITA Wordpress plugin adds a css (a slightly modified version of the DITA-OT commonltr.css) to your Wordpress theme to properly render the standard domains.

You can download both plugins here, they are released under the GPL license.

  • The dita2wp.zip contains a README file with instructions about installation and usage of the plugin.
  • The wp-dita-plugin.zip is very small Wordpress plugin, just unzip the file into your wordpress plugins folder and activate it in your Wordpress admin interface.

I tested only with Wordpress but the DITA-OT plugin should be able to publish to any blogging platform that supports the Blogger API.

UPDATE: A reader noticed a small mistake in the README file of the dita2wp plugin. In order to install the plugin in the DITA-OT the command should read ant -f integrator.xml instead of anf -f integrate.xml.

I also notice that, since 2.7, it is not possible anymore to update Wordpress pages using the Blogger API. If this is what you do with this plugin (my case) then you will have to change the xmlrpc.php page in your wordpress installation. Go to line 1912 and replace the following code:

1912
1913
1914
if (!$actual_post || $actual_post['post_type'] != 'post') {
	return new IXR_Error(404, __('Sorry, no such post.'));
}

with this one:

1912
1913
1914
if (!$actual_post) {
	return new IXR_Error(404, __('Sorry, no such post.'));
}

Tags: , , ,

24 Nov 08 Nightly builds

Hi there, just a little post to announce that from now on nightly builds of the DITA-OP Editor are available at pluginbuilder.org.

You can either download the latest plugins zip file here or use the nightly builds’ update site: http://dita-op.pluginbuilder.org/nightly/updateSite

Many thanks to Markus Wiederkehr and the pluginbuilder.org team for their help.

Get DITA Open Platform at SourceForge.net. Fast, secure and Free Open Source software downloads