Oxygen XML Blog 2022 Retrospective
- Statistics
- As an overview of the most read articles on the blog, we found out that articles about conversions from various formats (especially MS Word) to DITA XML, articles about learning DITA XML, and general tips and tricks articles were the most read. Also, I think we provided some good quality content covering these aspects in 2022. In total, we provided about 30 new articles to the blog in 2022.
- Collaborators
- This year, we had a lot more internal collaborators with contributors to the Oxygen XML Blog. Our web designers Mihai and Luci created a new color theme for the blog. My colleagues Cosmin Duna, George Bina, and Alex Smarandache contributed various interesting and useful articles to the blog. Our external collaborator Chris Papademetrious also submitted an article about enhancing DITA Open Toolkit project files.
- Moving the product forward
- The blog also served as a place to experiment with ideas that were later incorporated into Oxygen. For example, based on articles written in the blog, we added to Oxygen the capability to convert OpenAPI documents to DITA XML or to generate Google Structured Data content when publishing DITA XML content to WebHelp Responsive Output.
We hope you found the articles we added to the Oxygen XML Blog this year useful. If you have ideas about possible future articles that we could add to the blog, we are always open to suggestions, or you can also contribute articles yourselves: How You can Contribute to the Oxygen XML Editor Blog.
A more detailed list of contributions to the blog can be found below:
Colors and Layout Redesign
My colleagues Mihai and Luci (who maintain and design our web site) have had time this year to do a full redesign of the Oxygen WebHelp publishing template we are using to publish our blog's DITA XML content to WebHelp.
So thanks to their work the entire layout of the blog looks better now!
We also changed the WebHelp feedback authentication available on each page of the blog to the Oxygen XML organization so that with the same authentication, you can leave us feedback either on the Oxygen Users Guide Web pages or on the Oxygen XML Blog.
Migrating Word and Unstructured FrameMaker to DITA XML
DITA Publishing
In 2022, I wrote quite a few small articles based on my experiences with various DITA publishing customizations and they are all linked in this overview post: Publishing Customizations.
I also wrote an article about the various ways that we support the DITA Open Toolkit open source engine: Supporting the DITA OT Project as a Commercial Company.
My colleague Alexandru Smarandache submitted his first article about creating learning content for the Google Chatbot from DITA XML content.
Our client and friend Chris Papademetrious also submitted an article about enhancing DITA Open Toolkit project files: Preprocessing DITA-OT Project Files.
These articles were also presented at the DITA Open Toolkit Day 2022 along other interesting talks: https://www.oxygenxml.com/events/2022/dita-ot_day.html.
DITA Perspectives
Our boss and colleague George Bina contributed an article and a GitHub project with his experiments creating automatic graphs showing the hierarchy of DITA elements in the DITA specification: DITA Perspectives.