Welcome to the Home of Better Software Documentation
Tame Your Documentation
Software projects achieve popularity by meeting specific use cases, and being easy to use. Ease of use can be designed into the software in the form of user assistance. Or it can be offered through robust, and relevant user documentation. Ideally, you should offer both.
If you are the developer of a software project, you can write about how a product works very easily. After all, you designed and developed the product. You know how it works. You're an expert!
But how do you share your knowledge about your project to your audience? If you're a JBoss Developer project, you have a number of choices. You can write your documentation in XML, and use the JBoss Base Styles to format the output with a consistent look and feel. You can use JBoss Confluence for WYSIWYG User Docs. Or if you want something more lightweight, you can choose Markdown or AsciiDoc in GIT.
So you choose one of the commonly-accepted options above and get writing. You have installation instructions, developer content, administration information. You even have API documentation. You're on your way!
Over time, your user base is understanding your project better. They love using your product, and are demanding more targeted documentation to their use cases. You know the iinformation is there already in your documentation, but making targeted information for your customers seems "too hard" because you can't remix the info easily. Your content simply isn't modular enough.
You're finding information is getting harder to maintain. Your once concise user documentation suite is becoming unwieldly. Some documents are becoming dumping grounds for information because you can't easily split up the information between guides.
PressGang CCMS is the solution you're looking for. It lets you modularize your content, remix it, manage revisions, and publish to multiple formats. It even lets you import other types of documentation into the system so you can better manage the information. You keep your images and media together. Your project team can all make changes to documentation and see the changes in a few minutes. You can even completely reorganize your book by dragging and dropping objects in a plain-text documentation skeleton.
PressGang CCMS is build from the ground up on open source. It is free (as in Beer and Freedom). Other component content management systems cost tens of thousands of dollars to licence each year. PressGang CCMS costs you nothing.
Reach out to PressGang
| IRC | You can connect with us using IRC in the #PressGang freenode.org room. If you want to quickly ask a question, then this is the place to go. |
| Forums | The JBoss Community forums are a great place to go if you want to start a discussion about anything documentation related. Visit the JBoss Community PressGang site to start talking documentation. |
| You can also follow our tweets at http://www.twitter.com/PressGang We're not going to spam you to death, so follow us with confidence. | |
| Google+ | Circle the G+ page for release updates and other news. Low traffic, just like Twitter. |
