What wiki tools exist to generate shippable user doc from a wiki?

Question

I am looking into using a wiki (prefer mediawiki, but not a req.) as the repository for developer generated documentation (User Guides, Release Notes, Application Notes, Errata, etc.) from a collaborative/easy-to-update point of view a wiki seems like a good match, however since this documentation will ultimately ship to customers we want to be able to export the documents in their final state (e.g. during the release cycle) to static versions that no longer include histories.

Ideally the export would leave the document in a form (i.e. word doc, or legible HTML) where updates could be easily made by a non-programmer.

It would be good if niceties like section ordering and table of contents were available, or easy to add after the fact.

Are any tools with features like these available?

Answer 1

I'm a little confused.

If you want to ship the documentation in a formal like HTML, how would users continue editing? (use DumpHTML to generate HTML).

If you want to ship the documentation in Wiki form and allow users to continue editing, why not just replicate the database and get rid of the change history until a certain point? AFAIK MediaWiki has some support for this.

Answer 2

One option would be Mylyn WikiText, which is used by some Eclipse projects to generate Eclipse documentation from the Eclipse wiki (which is based on mediawiki). WikiText also supports other wiki markup (trac, textile, etc.) and other output formats (docbook, HTML, etc.).

Answer 3

It sounds like you need a step in your dev cycle that will take your HTML wiki contents and "documentify" them - doc/pdf/html for simpler delivery. If that's right, you could try something like Docmosis or JODConverter which can act as engines to do the conversion. The last step would be working out how to integrate it and have it automatically extract your wiki content to transform into a document.

Answer 4

In MoinMoin Wiki you can export to DocBook. DocBook can be converted to professional looking PDFs.

Answer 5

DokuWiki uses plain text files as storage backend which can be simply copied to your project as documentation.

Answer 6

First, don't discount that MediaWiki has a permanent link function. So, if you allow the readers to access your wiki, you can just send them a URL to a specific version of the page.

Alternatives - you can print a PDF. Wikipedia uses the Collection extension but there are others.

Finally, if you use Firefox and want a client side solution, use PrintPDF