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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

Comments:

It does seem like a nice tool in theory. But I noticed after clicking through the Wicket link... Apache supports at least 6 Java based web frameworks. I know that some of these are more than just a web-tier framework, but doesn't this seem ridiculous? Beehive Cocoon MyFaces Shale Struts Tapestry Wicket

Posted by Ted on February 09, 2007 at 10:08 AM MST #

The websites for both Apache ActiveMQ and Apache ServiceMix were some of the first sites to begin using the AutoExport plugin. So we've been using it for some time now and we're quite happy with it. It's especially handy to be able to edit a page and within minutes see the change appear on the site.

Posted by Bruce Snyder on February 10, 2007 at 09:29 AM MST #

I happen to think that the Confluence theme for Appfuse looks pretty sweet myself. Perhaps its just the bus that does it for me :-)

Posted by Dan Allen on February 12, 2007 at 08:43 AM MST #

Hi Matt, I'm going to look into getting the auto-export plugin upgraded for the latest release. Check back soon. Cheers, Jonathan

Posted by Jonathan Nolen on February 12, 2007 at 11:06 AM MST #

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