CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

We're preparing to roll out a customized implementation of CiviCRM to several of our partner organizations. We're writing our own documentation to cover our customizations – since our end-users are not technical we feel a turnkey, customized documentation site is the way to go, rather than separately maintaining docs on our customizations in one place and referring them to wiki.civicrm.org for the basics. We've secured a Confluence license so we can start with the existing docs for our efforts.

Today Dave G was kind enough to provide a Confluence space export of section 4 (end user's guide) to get us started. But we have a technical problem: we're running the latest release of Confluence, v 2.5.3, while wiki.civicrm.org runs v 2.1.4. Confluence only supports Forward Compatibility and Backward Compatibility for individual space import and export when executed within the same major version of Confluence instances, i.e. a space export from v 2.1.4 can only be imported into another installation of v 2.1.x. Running the latest version, we're unable to import the file Dave sent.

Confluence does support backward compatibility of an entire site export across major versions, meaning if Dave exported the entire wiki.CiviCRM.org Confluence site, then we could import it. This enables a workaround, but it's laborious:  you create a separate "scratch" install of the later version alongside your live site. You then do the entire site import from the previous version into the scratch install. Now, with both sites at v 2.5.3, you can do a space export on the portion you want, and import it into your live install.

This limitation and workaround are documented here: http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Restoring+a+Space

This workaround might be feasible to do a 1-time transfer to get us started, but the whole point of us using Confluence was to be able to easily merge in updates to the main CiviCRM docs, as well as easily contribute back to the main docs pages we write that are applicable to stock CiviCRM.

In order to achieve these goal it seems we have these options:

• We downgrade our Confluence to the 2.1 branch (if that's even possible)
• wiki.civicrm.org upgrades Confluence to 2.5 branch (please? maybe?  )
• We could conceivably dispense with our own Confluence installation altogether if CiviCRM would be willing to let us have a private space on wiki.civicrm.org to develop and maintain our custom documentation for our users. Is this even a remote possibility?

Anyone have some ideas?

I want to emphasize that we have a staff member with experience in technical writing who is spending a significant amount of her time creating documentation – this will likely result in some valuable documentation resources we'd love to contribute back to the main docs, if we can overcome these technical hurdles.

We're also interested in having a conversation on how best to keep updates to the main docs in sync with our docs.

Thanks!

Andy - I think it would be worthwhile for us to have a synchronous chat (skype or phone) to discuss your goals and brainstorm on some alternatives. Perhaps you can email me some times that would work in the next day or so.