Need of a documentation framework for LibreOffice?

Thanks. I will get back to you with more information on the group.

Marc

Hi Marc, *,

i did a quick setup of a Plone4 instance at a server of our German association, so
that we compare this CMS (with which many editors / reviewers of documentation are
familar) with Drupal.

(...)

Some of the Drupal Website team members will be taking a closer look
into the IA and hopefully we will have a site for you to test try and
give comments on what features that you would like to add.

IMHO, it would be great if a documentation member were to join the
Drupal team for direct input. We are just at the very start stages of
organising and will have some ideas coming through soon.

BTW ... Michael Wheatland has just left a note on the website mailist
re: and IA outline that had been proposed by Benjamin Horst a while ago.
You could also comment on this as well.

You can find the new Plone4.0.1-Instance here:
http://pumbaa.ooodev.org:9080/LOTest/

I created a first user:
LOTest1
with the user as pswd.

If there is a need for another user, please give me a ping.

Regards,
Andreas

Hi,

(...)

You can find the new Plone4.0.1-Instance here:
http://pumbaa.ooodev.org:9080/LOTest/

I created a first user:
LOTest1
with the user as pswd.

If there is a need for another user, please give me a ping.

I opened up a selfregistration on the site.

Regards,
Andreas

Thanks Andreas

It will be nice to compare both. The Drupal team is just now organising. This has given it a little push to get organised and we should be able to get more concrete demos soon. Let us know if there are some functionalities that you would like to see on the Drupal site and then we can compare them to each other. The idea is to reach a consensus as to which CMS will do the best job as well as Website dev member support.

Cheers

Marc

Hi Marc, *,

> Hi,
>
> (...)
>
>> You can find the new Plone4.0.1-Instance here:
>> http://pumbaa.ooodev.org:9080/LOTest/
>>
>> I created a first user:
>> LOTest1
>> with the user as pswd.
>>
>> If there is a need for another user, please give me a ping.
>
> I opened up a selfregistration on the site.
>
> Regards,
> Andreas

Thanks Andreas

It will be nice to compare both. The Drupal team is just now organising.
This has given it a little push to get organised and we should be able
to get more concrete demos soon. Let us know if there are some
functionalities that you would like to see on the Drupal site and then
we can compare them to each other. The idea is to reach a consensus as
to which CMS will do the best job as well as Website dev member support.

i hope, we can get more of the members on this list, that are writing and editing
documentation, involved in this evaluation. We need more input about things, they
have been used to, and things, they like to see in their future documentation
framework. Maybe the answer is not valid for the documentation team and for the needs
of the "rest" documentationfoundation-members. Then we had to decide, if we should
propose the use of two CMS. It should be no issue to set a routing from
libreoffice.org to the documentation site, if we need that.

I hope, we get enough input to think about the best way.

Regards,
Andreas

Hi Andreas thanks for the note.

Yes, the communication to the website developers by the documentation members should be very open and frank. I think the people who are going to put up the Drupal site are very willing to cooperate and to build pretty well whatever you wish, if the capability is there.

I think it is too early to propose two cms's but we should take a look and be critical or each Plone and Drupal and see if both can match what they do and after this see if there is support offered by either one of the CMS's to tweak more for what is best to make your jobs easier. Let's take a look at both so that the best option/decision be made.

I'll encourage the Drupal developers to join the document mailist to make things easier.

BTW ... we are getting more offers for Drupal development help so the help will be there. We have a lot of Drupal development people who are eager to get to work on the Drupal site.

Would you know if there is a lot of Plone developer help? We should also keep this in mind too.

Marc

Hi Marc, *,

(...)

Hi Andreas thanks for the note.

Yes, the communication to the website developers by the documentation
members should be very open and frank. I think the people who are going
to put up the Drupal site are very willing to cooperate and to build
pretty well whatever you wish, if the capability is there.

that's fine.

I think it is too early to propose two cms's but we should take a look
and be critical or each Plone and Drupal and see if both can match what
they do and after this see if there is support offered by either one of
the CMS's to tweak more for what is best to make your jobs easier. Let's
take a look at both so that the best option/decision be made.

I'll encourage the Drupal developers to join the document mailist to
make things easier.

+1

BTW ... we are getting more offers for Drupal development help so the
help will be there. We have a lot of Drupal development people who are
eager to get to work on the Drupal site.

Would you know if there is a lot of Plone developer help? We should also
keep this in mind too.

I currently know another member from the German team. We managed the Authors-Website
together. But I had not asked on the website or other lists yet.

In the meantime I created some more demo-stuff. I build inside the same environment a
sub-instance (independent) and a second main instance:

http://pumbaa.ooodev.org:9080/LOTest/LODevelopment
http://pumbaa.ooodev.org:9080/Authorstest

The first is with user selfregistration.

Regards,
Andreas

Thanks, I'll take a look. Is there anyway that someone on the documentation team to sketch out the workflow. You have developed this over a few years and we don't really have a workflow to work with. This would help to demistify workflow.

Marc

Hi Marc,

Hi Marc, *,

(...)

[...]

Thanks, I'll take a look. Is there anyway that someone on the documentation
team to sketch out the workflow. You have developed this over a few years
and we don't really have a workflow to work with. This would help to
demistify workflow.

I'll try to write down our workflow once I'm back home and send the
message to the list. :slight_smile:
Btw, if you want, you can add me to the development team as well. :slight_smile:

Sigrid

Thanks Sigrid. It looks like the Drupal site development is about to go full-tilt. It would be great if documentation members would start a wishlist of features and we will see if these can be implemented.

Cheers

Marc

Hi all,
I am one of the members involved with the website team. The workflow
diagram would be great in order to kick off discussions about
implementation. Also a description of the structure of the
responsibilities and permissions required for doc development would be
great.

This is the time for blue sky dreaming because at this point anything
is possible in the community.

Michael Wheatland (Wheatbix)

Will Drupal's book module be used for the user manuals? Or will they still
be edited in ODF then "uploaded" as the web-based documentation?

Hi Jeff,

first a wish from my side: please don't sent the complete email you are answering to
with your post. Because this is a mailinglist, you need only to resent the parts,
that are needed to understand your comments.

Will Drupal's book module be used for the user manuals? Or will they still
be edited in ODF then "uploaded" as the web-based documentation?

I think, we should use for the creation of user manuals the software we are
delivering to our users. We can then use our software to convert the documents to PDF
and publish them on the website. Most people don't need the odf-versions.

Regards,
Andreas

Andreas,
I do not disagree with you with the creation of user manuals in LibreOffice.
There has been no decision regarding the use of Drupal yet, but...
The Drupal book module allows the upload of ODF and PDF files as well
as copying the contents of that document into the webpage that holds
that document, in effect resulting in a version controlled html copy
of the document and file together in one official place.

This might be very useful in the future for links from the LibreOffice
help menu/system.

I think it might help in both documentation development and end user
ease of use.
Just an idea to ponder on.

Michael Wheatland (Wheatbix)
www.wheatland.com.au

Hi Andreas et al:

I am a big proponent of ODF files and as a teacher promote these to my student (grades 4-8). It would still be nice to have he .odf versions here and there to show people that the creation of these were done on LibO in a serious work environment.

But sure, .pdf would be nice.

Jeff -- re: using the Book module for the user manuals, yes we were looking into this. You could suggest another module if you had one in mind.

The sky is the limit for everything on Drupal.

Marc
I am also on the Drupal Dev Team

I'll second the proposal that both ODF and PDF files should be available
for downloading.

For most people, and most purposes, the PDFs are fine.

The virtue of the ODFs is that users can easily add additional
notes/documentation to their copy. My perception is that having the ODF
makes it slightly easier for people to grok creating and using styles.

Jeff -- re: using the Book module for the user manuals, yes we were looking
into this. You could suggest another module if you had one in mind.

The sky is the limit for everything on Drupal.

Hi Marc--this doesn't count as a Drupal module because it's an entirely
separate application, but I had purchased KBPublisher (
http://www.kbpublisher.com/) for a project I was working on several months
ago and we ended up not using it. I had purchased the "Small Biz" one. It is
a dedicated documentation application which supports a "book" type layout.
You can see a demo of it here: http://www.kbpublisher.com/kb/1/

I don't know how firm you guys are on using Drupal, but I have a license
that I am not using for this software, and I wouldn't mind donating it to
the project (I have no use for it). So, for what it's worth, it's available
for use if you guys want it.

Jeff

Jeff, as I have mentioned there has been no official decision made on
using Drupal at the current time.
As for being 'set' on using any one system, I think the vast majority
of us can agree that free open source software is the way to go.
There will be discussions within the website group as to the backbone
of this once the workflow and other requirements are set.
Thanks heaps for the offer!

Michael Wheatland (Wheatbix)
www.wheatland.com.au

Hi everyone,

I'm also on the website team,

The workflow diagram would be great in order to kick off discussions
 about implementation. Also a description of the structure of the
 responsibilities and permissions required for doc development would be
 great.

This is a most have, thanks for pointing it out.

The Drupal book module allows the upload of ODF and PDF files

Ok, with the Upload module.

as well as copying the contents of that document into the webpage that holds
that document,

I didn't know that :smiley: How can this me done? To had that requirements
(modules/tweaks) to the wiki.

in effect resulting in a version controlled html copy
of the document and file together in one official place.

+1 with the Diff module.

Cheers

Hi everyone,

Hi Marc--this doesn't count as a Drupal module because it's an entirely
separate application, but I had purchased KBPublisher (
http://www.kbpublisher.com/) for a project I was working on several months
ago and we ended up not using it. I had purchased the "Small Biz" one. It

is

a dedicated documentation application which supports a "book" type layout.
You can see a demo of it here: http://www.kbpublisher.com/kb/1/

Free software using not-free software.... mmm I'm not sure this is the kind
of message LibreOffice want. But thanks for your offering.

Drupal is quite strong, the demo site you showed help me out to go search
this functionality.

After two hours investigating :S I did found something similar:

http://drupal.org/project/booktree

And the demostration here:

http://uccio.org/booktree

As it is a list, it is easily styled.

I did also found this other helpful modules:

This will help allowed users to modify the outline of a book easily:

http://drupal.org/project/outline_designer

Adding this other two:

http://drupal.org/project/flat_book
http://drupal.org/project/tableofcontents

Will could get a nicely book ready to get printed:

http://drupal.org/project/print

Or using the export feature of the book standard module.

:smiley: