What is the purpose of a Docs CMS?

Tue Jan 27 21:08:05 UTC 2009

On Tue, 2009-01-27 at 12:48 -0800, Karsten Wade wrote:
> Document authoring continues as we've done -- some sourced in
> wiki/sourced in fhosted.org => SCM => XML + PO => {HTML,PDF,RPM,TBZ,ZIP...}

Aha!  OK, now I have a much clearer insight into what we're using the
CMS for.

> The CMS should remove pain at the end of all the current processes
> that are working fine.  This pain is, "How do I publish and manage a
> draft or final version of this document?"

OK, if this is the case (and trust me when I say that I'm relieved that
this is the case!), this brings up another set of questions:

1. How do we ensure that any editing that gets done in the CMS gets
pushed back to the authoritative DocBook?  Should we make a rule that
*no* editing be done in the CMS, and that the CMS is merely for viewing
the final output of the process you described above?

2. How do we expect the CMS to handle multi-page HTML output from the
toolchain above?  Typically, the XSL transforms our DocBook source into
either single-page HTML, multi-page HTML, or PDF documents.  The one
that concerns me the most is multi-page HTML.  Most CMS systems don't
take to kindly to importing a whole set of HTML pages, especially ones
that are all linked together and already have <head> elements, their own
stylesheets, etc.  This point still makes me wonder if what we need is
really a CMS, or just some kind of HTML-set management utility.

-Jared