Project management

[catherine]

I have a stupid question, it puzzles me these days, hope you can pull me out.
I have multiple languages of my documents.
For now, I create different oxygen projects for different languages.
I think it should be better to separate different languages of documents to different projects, for better management.

But, I find that if I change my customized css or html fragments, I need to change all of them in other projects.

Just need your professional suggestion of the project management for different languages.

Additionally, in a project, I put all my topic files into the folder "topic", should I have different folders for my topics...?
For example,
folder "configurations" contains all the topics for admin configurations.
folder "getting started" contains all the topics for getting started guides.
......

Will appreciate if you can give me any suggestion, thanks!

[Radu]

Hi Catherine,

So:

But, I find that if I change my customized css or html fragments, I need to change all of them in other projects.

I may not understand your question but how about if you have a single Oxygen project with a structure like:

Code: Select all

   myProject.xpr

      customizationsFolder/

         cssCustomizationsFolder/

         customHTMLFragmentsFolder/

      en/

        myDITAMapInEnglishFolder/   

      fr/

        myDITAMapInFrenchFolder/

What version control system are you using? For example with Subversion you can have svn external links so even if you do remain with having multiple Oxygen project folders, you can share the CSS and custom HTML folders between the multiple project folders, so that when committing the CSS in one project, you can update the other projects and have the changes reflected.

Additionally, in a project, I put all my topic files into the folder "topic", should I have different folders for my topics...?

Yes, I think that having multiple folders based on semantics is a good idea. For example Oxygen XML Editor has an "XSLT Debugger" perspective, so for our DITA content having a "debugger" folder which groups all the debugger-related topics would seem like a good idea. Do we do that? No, but we should Somehow we do not change the hierarchy of our folder structure because we do not want to break existing links to the documentation (as the extra folder structure will reflect in the published HTML content).
But if somebody starts a DITA project from the beginning I think it would be a good idea to semantically group topics in folders instead of creating folders based on the topic types (topic/task/concept).

Regards,
Radu

[catherine]

Hi, Radu
Thanks so much for your reply and suggestion.

For now, I have two project, one for English, one for Chinese.
And when I changed my customization css and HTML fragment, I have to change the same files in another language project.

It puzzles me, if I have more than two projects, I have to do reduplicative work.

As you suggested, you created one project for multiple languages, would that be better?

[Radu]

Hi Catherine,

It depends. You probably need to try that approach of having one project for both languages to find out if it's better in your case.

Regards,
Radu