Creating a Document Types chapter

[mbakeranalecta]

I am working my way through the configuration options chapter, which, quite correctly, follows the structure of the interface. However, when it gets to the Document Type Associations dialog box, I think this should be pulled out into a whole separate chapter.

A lot of the stuff in the options are relatively minor settings and options and are mostly based on the user's preferences and their environment. The Document Type Associations, on the other hand, is fundamental functionality that makes Oxygen adaptable for so many uses. It is one of the key things that makes Oxygen great, and it should not be buried four levels deep in the TOC.

I'd like to promote it to a chapter in its own right. Any disagreement?

[raducoravu]

I see we already have a chapter called "Predefined Document Types".
Then we have a "Document Type Association Preferences" topic which describes the Document Type Association Preferences page with lots of other subtopics.

And then we also have the "Advanced Customization Tutorial - Document Type Associations" topic which does about the same thing but is more technical, more oriented towards developers who want to create their own framework.

Possibly the first two could be merged in one common chapter.

[mbakeranalecta]

Something like that, yes. Fundamentally, we should be arranging task content by role and task. I see three basic task groupings related to document types:

• Authors who use the document types but do not customize them. It does not actually matter much to them if the ones they are using are built-in, customized versions of the built-in, or custom ones created by their content engineers.
• Content engineers or information architects who want to customize or extend existing document types to meet their organizational requirements.
• Content engineers or information architects who want to create custom document types from scratch.

So I would suggest three chapters, which would be similar to, but not exactly the same as the current ones:

• Using document types
• Customizing document types
• Creating document types

Thoughts?

[georgebina]

(framework = document type - I will use framework because it is shorter and document type can be confused with DOCTYPE or the generic meaning of the words)
I do not see a big difference in creating a framework from scratch or to extend or modify an existing framework.
Maybe we can keep in the preferences chapter information about what we have on the Document Type Association page itself and do not go into the Edit dialog, and link to a chapter dedicated to customizing frameworks that describes all the options available inside the Edit dialog, this later chapter should also include a section with the predefined document types.