How best to distribute custom DITA-OT plugins to team of content writers

[mvskarthik]

Hi,

I have DITA-OT plugins developed for custom transformation. The plugins are working fine in my local. I've the plugins stored into SVN repository. I want to distribute these plugins with team of content writers. How best to distribute the custom DITA-OT plugins to team of content writers with minimal effort by considering content writers are not much technical experts.

It would be great if you can refer any pointers on this.

Oxygen Editor/Author 23.0

Thanks,
Karthik.

[xephon]

Hi,

I usually provide the whole customized DITA-OT as a ZIP file and not each plugin separately. This toolkit is available on SharePoint. With a button the technical writer can download it on demand and extract it. This is done via an ant script. In this script I check the timestamp of the toolkit first to only download and extract it, if it has changed. It's also possible to store the toolkit on a webserver and/or use the oxygen plugin mechanism to share it.

Best regards

[Radu]

Hi,

I agree that an entire DITA OT distribution would be the best way to ship a DITA OT to all users.
We have a plugin extension allowing an Oxygen plugin to contribute an entire DITA OT:

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

So you can create an add-on for Oxygen like the one here:
https://github.com/oxygenxml/dita-ot-3x-plugin

place the add-on on your own local HTTP server and have people install it using Oxygen's main menu Help->"Install new add-on" action.
Then in the Oxygen Preferences->DITA page users will find as a possible default DITA OT location the DITA OT bundled with the add-on.

Regards,
Radu

[chrispitude]

Hi Karthik,

To distribute DITA-OT plugins to my writers, I use the solution described here:

"Providing DITA plugins in an Oxygen project directory?"
post61089.html

The script in that post is specific to Windows, but a similar approach could potentially be used for other operating systems.