Writing documentation

We have moved writing documentation from a (cryptic and fragile) XML format to the less fragile Wiki format of Confluence. This document describes what happens after you edit or add a new page here.

Auto export

The Wiki pages for all Apache Confluence spaces are exported to a static website to ensure the scalability concerns of the Apache hardware. This is done using Pier's autoexport plugin. It uses a template for the export and this template (a Velocity file) can be applied to a space (each space can have its own export template).

The static website is found at: http://cwiki.apache.org/SPACE_NAME

After the export to cwiki.apache.org a script from Jeff Turner copies the contents of all confluence spaces to his people.apache.org home directory, found here:

http://people.apache.org/~jefft/confluence/

Now the difference kicks in: a small script (attached to the JIRA issue WICKET-25 or one of its subtasks) runs in Martijn Dashorst's crontab and copies the files from Jeff's folders to our /www/wicket.apache.org folder where the stylesheets are already in place.

This script setup means that any change to the contents of the Wiki is only propagated to our official website in at most an hour (the frequency the scripts run).

Our Wicket website

The site is set up as follows: the navigation (the menu on the left) is generated by including the page Navigation in the right spot. This means that the site needs to be generated completely when ever that page is modified. Editing the menu is then as simple as editing the Navigation page.

Adding pages to the WICKETxSITE website is as simple as adding pages to confluence and providing a link to it.