Potential Documentation Platforms

The Fluid community is planning to move the Infusion documentation out of Confluence to a new platform. This page is a worksheet for summarizing evaluations of the various options being considered.

This table is a work in progress.

	Confluence	MediaWiki	MindTouch Deki	Drupal	WordPress	DocBook/ DITA	Markdown (or similar)	Sphinx
Description	wiki	wiki	wiki	CMS	XSLT transformation of XML	XSLT transformation of XML, very structured	structured mark-up, very simple	reStructuredText & DocUtils, more structured
Used by	Infusion	Handbook	MDN	Drupal	jQuery	php.net		Django, Python
Must-Have Requirements	Confluence	MediaWiki	MindTouch Deki	Drupal	WordPress	DocBook/ DITA	Markdown (or similar)	Sphinx
documentation must be accessible and transformable (output should be HTML styled using CSS)			Cursory Jaws test ok
anyone (on the core team or in the community) can contribute to the documentation						source in Git: XML schemas	source in Git: wiki-style markup	source in Git: wiki-style markup
the authoring interface must be accessible			uses FCKEditor? cursory Jaws test NOT ok		cursory Jaws test ok	can use any editor, but actual XML editor might be best
we can embed components/JS in the documentation to allow working examples				using <script> tags in the head	using <script> tags in the head	using <script> tags in the head		can embed raw HTML in page
there must be a means to have a "staging area" where docs can be written, updated etc. before becoming publicly available	entire space can be cloned			entire copy of drupal site can be cloned	staged in WordPress, converted to HTML for "publication"	source in Git, public docs would be generated from source	source in Git, public docs would be generated from source	source in Git, public docs would be generated from source
Would-be-nice Requirements	Confluence	MediaWiki	MindTouch Deki	Drupal	WordPress	DocBook/ DITA	Markdown (or similar)	Sphinx
the platform should be open source			GPL & LGPL		GPLv2	MIT-style	BSD-style	Python license
documentation can be versioned to match numbered releases	using separate spaces	maybe using namespaces?
anyone can comment on or discuss the documentation (e.g. comments on Confluence pages, "discuss" pages in wikipedia)
pages can be tagged					using a plugin
documentation can be made available in PDF	export possible, but annoying	possible, don't know quality of output yet	possible, don't know quality of output yet					export to LaTeX, or using rst2pdf