"Getting Started" with Oxygen Projects

[thedantanner]

Greetings,

I'm still something of a newb to Oxygen. I've been using it to author DITA content for about a year now. I'm looking for any advice or tips that anyone could provide me on implementing the use of Projects in Oxygen. I've read all of the documentation in the manual, and I've watched a webinar on how to use projects. Still, I haven't had that lightbulb moment where I realize the usefulness of using projects to author my content.

Right now, all of our authoring is done using the DITA Maps Manager. We simply load up the bookmap and edit, add, or remove topics from there. I've tried a few times to build a project from scratch, and I find myself frozen right from the start because I don't have any understanding of how they work or why they're useful.

If anyone has any advice, I'd be most grateful. I'm not sure what details you need, but here are some basics...

version:
Oxygen 19.1

Repository File Structure:

=============
repository (root of our repository which contains all bookmaps and the following subfolders...)
+ditamaps
+topics
++section_1_topics (contains topic files AND images for section 1 of our manuals)
++section_2_topics
++section_3_topics
++conrefs (contains two conref topic files which house all of our content references. also contains several commonly used images.)
===============

Output:
DITA 2.0 using a custom PDF transformation scenario


Cheers,
Dan

[Radu]

Hi Dan,

We actually have a past webinar recording which deals with all aspects related to projects:

https://www.oxygenxml.com/events/2016/w ... jects.html

Basically you can create a new project in the Oxygen Project view and save it in your "repository/" root folder.
Besides what the webinar explains about sharing settings via project options I think one of the main benefits when working with DITA is that you can add your top level DITA Maps to the "Master Files" folder:

https://www.oxygenxml.com/doc/versions/ ... files.html

Once you do that, you can drag and drop topics or images, rename them, move them around in the project and all references to them will be automatically updated.

Regards,
Radu

[thedantanner]

Thanks, as always, Radu. Just the simple act of saving the project file in the main repository was enough to get me rolling on creating a new project. As I come discover new things I'm quickly seeing how useful projects are as an organizing platform.