[TYPO3-dev] A few thoughts about extension manuals.

[Daniel Bruessler]

Hello Stephan,

yes, that would work with a small user-number and small manuals. I tried
that - and it worked well until we saw the limits, several limits.

It's really the best to stick with .sxw format for a while with
OpenOffice as editor - and then do the step to .odt . OpenOffice is a
really easy-to-use editor, compare it with the usability of an
XML-editor like oXygen. For this the renderer needs to be able to output
.html . Is not a big thing, just needs a bit of work and enough testing.

The .html are rendered by parsing the content.xml what is inside of the
.sxw (it's an archive)

There's also a docbook-xml for every manual - but that's not in use yet.
The idea of it is to version the changes by svn.

Cheers!
Daniel

> I have just updated one of my extensions and also updated the manual. It 
> took a lot of time to do, and quite disappointed with the rendered result 
> (especially on the template and local language token sections)!
> 
> I assume that the OOo doc is turned in to one big text field in some record 
> somwhere and split into pages on h1 tags.
> 
> Since you have to provide your login information to upload to the ter why 
> not allow users (who all know how to use TYPO3 anyway) to login and edit the 
> document directly (or even via FE editing). This would stop the need for 
> document rendering which takes time anyway, and would stop the rendered 
> manual look like 5h!t. If you really then need an open cross platform 
> offline manual included with the template the ter could generate a static 
> html file for the whole manual (complete with images).
> 
> Also when small changes need to be made you wouldn't need to upload a whole 
> new version of the extension.
> 
> Stephen. 
> 
>