22 Jun 08 DITA-OP 1.0.0 M1 Announcement

I am pleased to announce the first milestone of the DITA Open Platform version 1.0.0

This milestone is a test release in order to see if there is interest in the DITA community for what the DITA Open Platform project plans to offer. It is also a mean to collect suggestions and ideas from the community.

The goal of this project is to provide the DITA community with a free and easy-to-deploy DITA oriented production platform. It is targeted at small companies or teams that do not need a complete CMS solution.

The key deliverable of this milestone is the DITA-OP Editor, an Eclipse-based set of plugins featuring:

• The complete DITA architecture and language specification available through the Eclipse help system
• A DITA project nature which enables DITA files validation (pure XML validation and hyperlink references validation) and problem markers
• Wizards and templates to create new DITA files (topics, concepts, references, tasks, maps, bookmaps and processing profiles)
• A processing profile (ditaval) form editor
• A topic editor which leverages the power of the Eclipse XML editor (content assist, templates, as you type validation, formatting) with a dedicated preview page
• A launch configuration dedicated to the DITA Open Toolkit which enables setting up the toolkit scripts, saving your configuration for later reuse or sharing and even adding automatic build to your DITA project.

Next step will be to provide a server packaging enabling:

• Configuration management of the DITA files
• Management of the authoring process
• Management of the publication process

For downloading please refer to the download page on this site.

Complete documentation has yet to come but the documentation page should give you an overview of what is already possible.
I will answer questions and support requests on the Yahoo! dita-users group.

Claude