Extreme Makeover - Documentation Edition

With the release of Enterprise Rhaptos, we have improved the documentation on the Rhaptos Trac wiki. The documentation has been expanded and rearranged, and includes much deeper technical documentation.

The Rhaptos Trac wiki home page now has quick links at the top of the page to information about Enterprise Rhaptos, Connexions/Rhaptos Development, APIs for Accessing Data and Test and Quality Assurance.

Enterprise Rhaptos

The Enterprise Rhaptos documentation includes a quick install page that can have you running Rhaptos in only a few minutes. The install uses Buildout and can install the Rhaptos software on your Debian Linux server. Enterprise Rhaptos is also changing the way we do development internally at Connexions. We can build development instances much faster than before and the code structure in Subversion (SVN) has changed. There is a clean separation between Rhaptos and Connexions code which has led us to have 2 top level folders in SVN, rhaptos and cnx. The previous method was for each product to be in a top level folder.

Connexions/Rhaptos Development

Connexions/Rhaptos Development starts with links to our mailing lists, this blog and some older developer blogs on the rhaptos.org site. If you are thinking of doing some development, please sign up for our mailing lists. There is lots of good information being passed around, but not so much that it will fill your inbox everyday. There is a Roadmap of our plans for Connexions development through June 2010.

Technical Documentation

Technical Documentation is where we have expanded and added the most documentation. We now have instructions for installing Rhaptos and Connexions. There is also a Buildout FAQ to help troubleshoot your installation. As part of Enterprise Rhaptos, Connexions has created a large body of Selenium tests for the site. These have been exported into Python. Details of running these tests with Buildbot or manually are now documented. We are starting to use Buildbot as a continuous build system for our development. This should help us find defects earlier in the development process and improve our code quality.

Code Documentation has been added and brings some much needed information about Connexions and Rhaptos source code. There is documentation covering each product in Connexions, some general Plone information and a few tips and tricks. Also covered is most of the functionality in Connexions such as Collection Editing, Content Rendering, Edit In Place, Lenses, MathML Message Behavior, Module Editing, Monkey Patching, Printing, Schemas and Workgroups.

APIs for Accessing Data

This section has links to information about our RSS feeds, URL's to get rendered pages of content, member profiles, lenses, statistics, etc. and Open Archives metadata harvesting. Also included are links about downloaded and branding Connexions content. Kathi wrote an earlier blog post about this on the Connexions blog.

Test and Quality Assurance

Test and Quality Assurance remains to be improved and cleaned up. However, there is some useful information in the Test Plan section. We have used several of these to create our new Selenium tests.

Our hope is to continue improving our documentation with help from the Connexions team, Consortium members, authors and users. If you are interested in contributing or have a comment about the new documentation, just let us know at cnx@cnx.org.