how to use Dokuwiki for creating a common user manual

Question

I am trying to use Dokuwiki for creating a software user manual, given that I have to create 3 user manuals for the same product in different platform and the changes is very less. Is there any way in Dokuwiki to create a common user manual that can be used for different products?

Answer 1

This answer applies to any wiki engine, not just DokuWiki.

Basically, what you need to do is factor out the common part of the documentation into separate pages that can be included in the product-specific pages. For DokuWiki this requires the include plugin (www.dokuwiki.org/plugin:include), although transclusion is often core functionality for a wiki. I'd suggest starting to write documentation for the most common product and then go back to see what portions of that can be pulled out to use for the common documentation.

Answer 2

For the specifics of DokuWiki I'd recommend the site export plugin (primarily because I made it and we use it for our documentation as well).

You can create the chapters of your book just like a normal page in your wiki. When it comes to combining them into different books, create a page called "toc" in a different namespace. In there have the following syntax (see the github page for details):

  * [[namespace:chapter1]]
    * [[namespace:chapter1.1]]
    * [[namespace:chapter1.2]]
  * [[namespace:chapter2]]
    * [[namespace:chapter2.1]]
    * [[namespace:chapter2.2]]

Now you can export this namespace with the roc option enabled - and merged into one document. You could also use the PDF export with custom book-like styles now (this is what we do primarily).