[docbook-apps] Re: DocBook blog..

["M. Sean Gilligan" <seanlist at msgilligan dot com>]

>/ Fredrik Svensson <fred@ludd.ltu.se> was heard to say:
>| Anyone else that has been contemplating this ? or know of any tools
>| that would work without too much development?)
>
>I guess I'd look at one of the server side toolkits.

I've been playing around with Blojsom <http://www.blojsom.org> recently.  Blojsom is Java-based (which is a big plus for me) and looks fairly modular and flexible (so far.)  Apple will be bundling a version of Blojsom with the next OS X Server.  I have some interest in using it as an internal blog for software engineering collaboration and using DocBook for markup would allow us to paste anything good into more traditional documentation.

There are several approaches I have considered for using DocBook:

1) Use a plugin at "post" time that will convert from DocBook to XHTML (and keep both in parallel so you don't have to do the transform on-the-fly.)  Blojsom supports Wiki/Textile type markup on input, but I haven't looked at the API here to see if XSLT could be used.

2) Use CSS and/or client-side XSLT to do the transformation (since I want to use  it on the intranet, it would be acceptable to require FireFox or a capable browser)  I think I read somewhere that there are some new and fairly nice CSS stylesheets for DocBook.

3) Use XSLT on-the-fly, but with caching.  Cocoon is a possibility here, but I think Blojsom offers some caching capability as well.

I've also thought that an XML-RPC or Atom plugin for jEdit would allow for client side editing with validation and tag-completion before posting to the blog.

I don't know what the best "DTD" to use would be.  Would each blog entry be an article or would it be something like a section?  I like the idea of section because most blog packages will create different archive views into the content.
I use the WebSite DTD for my personal website and wonder if there would be any advantages to using it for a blog.

I haven't given this serious thought, so all of these ideas are half-baked at best, but probably worth looking into at least a little further.

Feel free to e-mail me directly if you are interested in pursuing this further.  If your needs/approach are similar to mine, I may be willing to help out a little.

Regards,

Sean
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