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20070209 Friday February 09, 2007

Slick looking Confluence sites You have to admit, both Wicket and Cayenne have nice looking websites. Did you know they're both backed by Confluence? Wicket has a Writing documentation page that explains how it works. Basically, they use the autoexport plugin to export their content to static files. If you configure this plugin to be invoked from a cron job, it's a great way to create a constantly updating dynamic-but-static site.

I believe there's a couple reasons Apache uses this setup: 1) it allows projects to customize the look and feel of their site w/o customizing how Confluence looks and 2) it reduces load on its servers since most content is served up statically. I've thought about using a similar setup for AppFuse's documentation, but I've run into a couple issues:

  • The autoexport plugin is pretty flaky. The latest release (0.13) doesn't work with Confluence 2.2.9. Strangely enough, the previous version (0.12) works fine. It looks like the author had a good run with this plugin when he created it (almost a year ago), but hasn't updated it since.
  • The dynamic tree menu doesn't get included in the export. If I could somehow include this tree (and the current theme) when exporting, it'd be very cool.
  • The new code macro works much better than the {code} macro, but it has exporting issues both with PDF and the autoexport plugin. I tried using the code macro, but it doesn't show any syntax highlighting when using an Adaptavist Builder theme.

Apache's setup for Confluence appears to be quite good. I wonder if we should use it for AppFuse? We don't have the bandwidth/load issues that they do - and we've managed to make the site look decent using Adaptavist Builder. I like having a single source of constantly changing documentation, rather than two sites, where one is static. I think this causes confusion for users if the documentation changes a lot. That being said, I would like to export the content for bundling and versioning with each release. I wonder if Atlassian is planning on fixing the new code macro exporting issue anytime soon? Posted in Java at Feb 09 2007, 08:02:54 AM MST 4 Comments