By desrod on

Our Free Software project has about 40 manpages with it; one for each userland binary that accompanies each release.

In an effort to keep those manpages current, updated, and available, we're looking to Drupal as a means of delivering them (along with the rest of our site and documentation). Our manpages are kept in DocBook XML (SGML) now, and we generate the man and html/text versions from that base.

What is the best approach to get this content:

  1. ..into Drupal in such a way that allows our community of users to continue to update and edit the pages (a node of type "book" seems like the best approach), and
  2. in a way that we can then extract later, to roll back into our releases as actual manpages at project release time (if these are XML, troff/nroff, or some sort of formatted text we can parse into XML again, that would be fine).

Granted, this is a lofty goal, but I'm pretty sure if it doesn't exist already, it could be done with some filters, both in and out.

Any pointers or leads on this that can help us out here?

Comments

veridicus’s picture

veridicus commented

I'm currently building a site for hosting technical documentation using drupal. I'm about to start on a major import/export module. I want to be able to import a variety of document formats (HTML, DocBook, man pages, etc.) into sets of drupal nodes. Then I want to provide links for pages or books to output in a variety of formats (DocBook, man pages, PDF (already exists), LaTeX, etc.).

I want the site to be a central source to open source documentation. I'm hoping projects will want to host their documentation on my site if I provide enough functionality (all free, of course). It should be easy for them to post and easy for readers to find, read, and download.

I've worked on two modules so I don't have any problems with Drupal integration. The issue for me is all the details in parsing and outputting all of these formats. It's tedious so I'm looking for tools which help. If you have a plan for input/output of the various formats I can easily integrate it with drupal.

Contact me here or on my profile's contact page if you'd like to work together on such a module, or at least share ideas while I begin.
---
Don't use Microsoft software

kennyg’s picture

kennyg commented

Any success yet? I have been looking for something to import docbook into a Drupal Book.

timmillwood’s picture

timmillwood
Primary language English
Location 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 Wales, UK
commented

I need this too, anyone?