This week we launched modulecraft.com a fundraising tool that we want to use to raise interest, involvement and money for the development of a series of tools for Drupal professionals. Pure donation systems like chip-in have a pretty bad track record, but a donation/reward system has to our knowledge not yet been tried in the Drupal community. When you donate you will be contributing to the community AND getting something valuable in return.
We launched the platform with Documentation+, our first fundraising effort which primary aim is the development of a Documentation distro for Drupal.
For a couple of years now, people in the documentation team have been wanting to implement a DITA architecture for the documentation. DITA is an open standard managed that was initially developed by IBM that is now managed by Oasis. It is fairly young, but has gained a lot of momentum in the documentation industry.
We want to build a documentation distribution that uses a similar approach as the localization server and that enables a distributed/federated documentation architecture for the Drupal project. As a Drupal user you'll be able to get a set of documentation from the drupal.org docs server imported into your own site. You will than be able to edit it and build subsets of the documentation for your own projects. You'll also be able to submit topics that were edited or created by you on your own infrastructure and add them as suggestions to the Drupal documentation server. DITA has a modular format that makes it possible to reuse the same documentation topics in different maps, so you'll be able to create dedicated documentation sets for your projects.
You'll than be able to export the documentation in the DITA format, which can with the help of the DITA Open Toolkit in turn be transformed into XHTML, Microsoft Compiled HTML Help (aka Windows help or .chm), Eclipse Help, Java Help, Oracle Help and Rich Text Format and PDF through XSL-FO | reference here.
Using a newer version of the semantic editor/filter/layer system that we developed before, you'll be able to inline add DITA attributes, such as for example audience type (technical, management, end user) or platform (Windows, Linux, Mac).
The DITA distribution, just like the localization server, will be useful for projects outside of the Drupal community. A lot of people are looking for a WIKI style web interface for building DITA documentation, the documentation distribution will give them a platform on which they can build Drupal sites that fit their individual needs.
With this fundraising website we want to involve and commit as much people into the process as possible. If you want to help: submit or vote on user stories, follow us on twitter, blog or tweet about us (check out our banners) and if you can, consider donating.
