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.

05 Nov 08 Mylyn WikiText targets OASIS DITA

Even before I start the DITA-OP project I was looking for ways to ease the authoring of DITA documents. As a developer I am used to manually edit XML files and thus a good XML editor is enough to me. But not everyone is a nerd and writing XML is not the panacea…

With the success of wikis I came to think (like many people) that if DITA syntax could be simplified enough to be expressed using a wiki markup (even a specialized one) it could be a leap forward into DITA adoption.

When I read, some months ago, that the textile-j project, lead by Dave Green, was moving into the Eclipse Mylyn project incubator I though that I had to keep an eye on this.

And now, Dave is announcing that Mylyn WikiText can now output DITA documents.

Those are really interesting new!

I have to admit that I have been quite busy since August and that my day job left me little time for this project (and my other personal projects).

However, I expect things to calm down in the next weeks and the work on M2 is almost done. So I cross fingers and hope I will have time to finish and release it before christmas.

Once this is done, I will concentrate on the map editor but I will surely take some time to evaluate the possibilities of integration of WikiText.

14 Jul 08 Thank you and next step…

It has been nearly one month since I released the first milestone of the DITA Open Platform. Since then I received a lot of positive feedback and encouragements either through the dita-users Yahoo! group, via direct e-mail and even on my personal blog.

I wanted to thank you all for your help and support and announce I already corrected some bugs and  implemented some suggested features in the editor plugins that will come with the next milestone (you can see them all here).

For the second milestone, my plan is to release an easy-to-install packaging containing:

• The Trac project to ease information sharing and enable project management
• The Bitten plugin for Trac for continuous integration build
• The DITA Open Toolkit to be used by Bitten to build the documentation
• Subversion for content management, with the corresponding Trac integration.
• Various Trac plugins to ease integration (eg. the XML-RPC plugin which enables Mylyn integration) and management

I hope to get that milestone released by next October (no pledge). Have you any suggestion or comment feel free to leave me a note here or on the dita-users Yahoo! group.

Regards,
Claude