Actually what happened is that, given the economic downturn, last year I though I should not refuse any of the jobs I was offered. I finally ended up with so much work that I had no time left for this project. I expect things to slow down in the next months so that I will be able to dedicate a significant amount of time to the DITA-OP.

In the mean time, the nightly build of the editor has the latest bug fixes and enhancements. Especially it has a new ditamap editor. Unfortunately some users have reported issues with the Galileo release of Eclipse. I guess this is the first thing I will have to check.

See you soon,
Claude

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 :)

• 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

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

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.'));
}

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.

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.

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

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