Confluence as Living Documentation

So, what might be needed?

  • sidebar. This could be the page hierarchy.
  • header with multiple documentation entry points.
    • each documentation piece was a space (install, configure, faq, troubleshooting).
      • the faq and troubleshooting are the major one that needs thier own spaces.
  • versioning or space copying.
  • spell checking

Chris Duxbury: I love the http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/docs/v2.5.3/, which is done in forrest. At first I thought that it would be nice to be able to export in a format that would be compatible. Then I thought, why not just ask for those features to be added to Confluence. With the ability that users can comment, it would make PHP Manual-like living documentation.

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  1. Jan 21, 2004

    Mike Cannon-Brookes says:

    David, We are using Confluence for the Confluence documentation itself, so that...

    David,

    We are using Confluence for the Confluence documentation itself, so that we can learn more about how well it works for this purpose. You are right about commenting though, I've always liked that in the PHP documentation.

    Sidebar The sidebar is quite easy and can already be done with b4 - there is now a #includePage() velocity macro which can include any page as a part of the decorator for every page. So you could simply include a page which had the hierarchy on it, or any part of the hierarchy you wanted, and presto - a global nav bar!

    Header You could do this the same was as the sidebar above?

    Space copying Copying a space, why would one want to do that again? (BTW we have 'move page' implemented now in b4 - which allows you to move a page between spaces, with optional renaming, and all links are maintained)

    The other benefits of this of course are that you get instant HTML and PDF export of your documentation - which could be used in the short term for versioning (ie maintain a library of HTML & PDF docs for old versions and just use the website for the 'latest' docs).

    Mike

  2. Jan 22, 2004

    David Valentine says:

    Copy space ~= archive space I'm thinking that it would be hard to figure out ho...

    Copy space ~= archive space

    I'm thinking that it would be hard to figure out how to associate comments with versions. If a new comment comes in, is it associated with the latest documentation, or an earlier version.
    When you have updated the documentation, you might want to drop the comments, but those comments still apply to the older version.

    Probably thinking way too much.