CM Professionals DITA Community

STEERING COMMITTEE
JoAnn Hackos - JoAnn.Hackos at Comtech-Serv.com
Bill Trippe - btrippe at nmpub.com
Kay Ethier - kethier at travelthepath.com
Scott Abel - abelsp at netdirect.net
Steve Manning - manning at rockley.com
Bob Doyle (tech support) - editor at cmsreview.com

Members
Rahel Anne Bailie - rabailie at intentionaldesign.ca
Anna van Raaphorst - avanraaphorst at att.net
Erik Hartman - erik at hartman-communicatie.nl
Julie Norris - jn at seanet.com
Kathy Henry - v-khenry at microsoft.com
Nenad Furtula - nenadf at bluestream dot com

STATEMENT OF PURPOSE
To encourage structured authoring in the wider CM Professionals community in general and on the CM Professionals website in particular. This community will provide a technical resource for members who want to learn XML authoring and editing, specifically using the new DITA XML initiative from OASIS.

SCOPE OF WORK
We will develop a structure for reporting of Best Practices that will be used to describe CM Professionals research into several already identified best practice areas. (See https://www.cmsconsultants.org/resources/bestPractices.html)

We will first try to develop a Design Patterns DITA map, which then could be specialized as a Best Practices DITA map.

The hope is that this work will find application beyond the CM Professionals community of practice. Therefore this community will work closely with DITA users who are not presently members of CM Professionals, and with the OASIS Technical Committee for DITA, to share the design effort, with the hope that both the Design Patterns and the Best Practices structures will find the widest possible applications.

DELIVERABLES
The main deliverables will be

1. A CM Professionals DITA XML resources page
2. Drafting a DITA information architecture for Design Patterns and Best Practices.
3. Developing specific Content Management Best Practices that are published on the CM Professionals website from a single-source DITA document, which appears on the web, in print (as PDF), and on handheld devices, as a technology demonstration of single-source, multi-channel publishing.
4. Using DITA tasks as the structure for CM Professionals Member Help pages. We have drafted two pages at /membership/member_help.

Reference: http://www.cmsreview.com/Practices/DITA/

MAILING LIST.
The CM Professionals DITA Community mailing list is at dita@lists.cmprofessionals.org
To subscribe, go to lists.cmprofessionals.org/mailman/listinfo/dita

OVERVIEW

From the earliest days of CM Professionals' founding, the Board of Directors has called for demonstration examples of XML on the website, as well as examples of content reuse. Reusable content blocks appear on many web pages, but they do not use XML.

The CM Professionals website developers included sample XML pages on the site. These are processed with a custom XSD Schema page and a custom server-side XSLT transform to HTML. When these pages are requested, the current XML is handed off to an XSLT processor and the HTML page is created dynamically. The XML page can be edited using our regular web page editor, which edits the XML code. See the Controlled Vocabulary Best Practice for an example of a dynamic XML page.

Since the formation of the CM Professionals DITA Community, a new goal has been to create DITA XML pages. DITA OT 1.2 has been installed on the server and is ready to process DITA pages. But because DITA OT processing is slow compared to our custom XSLT, we will need a production strategy that publishes the resulting HTML page to the actual serving page. (Dynamic page creation on demand would be too slow.)

Since editing DITA is greatly facilitated by using a DITA-aware XML Editor, we also need an off-line (desktop) creation strategy.

We have two options here.

• Upload the DITA XML page to our website and invoke the ant build process of the DITA OT to create the serving (requested) page on the server.
• Transform the DITA XML page to HTML on the desktop and upload the resulting HTML to the website.

 

For the moment, one DITA XML page has been created in a desktop editing tool (XMetaL Author DITA Edition). XMetaL allows editing only the pure content (in a quasi-WYSIWYG mode), so the XML code is hidden from the writer. Because the DITA OT is built into that tool, we created the HTML version off-line and uploaded the result to the CM Professionals website using the Upload facility of our CMS. See the Design Patterns Best Practice for an example of a DITA XML page.

We are looking for CM Professionals members with XML or DITA experience and some hoping to learn DITA who are willing to be trained to edit and upload pages to the CM Professionals website.

We hope that this work will find application beyond the CM Professionals community of practice. Therefore DITA Community will work closely with DITA users who are not presently members of CM Professionals, particularly with the OASIS Technical Committee for DITA, to share the design effort, with the hope that both the Design Patterns and the Best Practices structures will find the widest possible applications.

To join our DITA Community, subscribe to the DITA Community mailing list and tell us what you expect to contribute and to learn. You can subscribe at lists.cmprofessionals.org/mailman/listinfo/dita