Running the initial Beta trials of doQer hasn’t taken up all of our attention recently; we’ve also been working hard on adding a major new piece of functionality to the system. Whereas up until now users have only been able to put an existing manual into doQer, we’re now implementing the functionality required for users to actually edit their manuals from within doQer, and even create new manuals from scratch.

This capability represents a major piece of the jigsaw in making doQer a really useful application, and it has always been in our roadmap to implement, but it’s complex to achieve from a technical perspective. Embarking upon it, there were some key objectives that we wanted to achieve:

Version Control
It should be possible for users to revisit previous edits, compare, and revert to previous versions of the manual.

Easy Formatting
Writing the manual should not need extensive knowledge of a mark-up language. It should be easy, allowing users to put ideas down quickly to create a manual.

Media Manager
Uploading and including images in a manual must be easy and quick.

The more we thought about these requirements, the more it seemed that integrating a Wiki engine would do the trick. Wikis are flexible and powerful, and most importantly allow us to work with existing, stable code without reinvent the wheel!

Settling on a Wiki engine was difficult given the large number of options available. Luckily we found WikiMatrix, a really useful site that let’s you enter what you are looking for in a Wiki and then gives you a couple of options to try.

In the end we decided to go with DokuWiki:

DokuWiki is a standards compliant, simple to use Wiki, mainly aimed at creating documentation of any kind. It’s targeted at developer teams, workgroups and small companies. It has a simple but powerful syntax which makes sure the datafiles remain readable outside the Wiki and eases the creation of structured texts. All data is stored in plain text files – no database is required.

DokuWiki has all the features we need, and the syntax is perfect in it’s simplicity. The software is Open Source and lightweight, so we were able to modify it to integrate with doQer’s current features. It also keeps the manuals as text files, so from a development perspective it eases the difficulties of managing lots of database tables!

Once the new functionality is implemented, as well as allowing full authoring capabilities from within the browser, authors will benefit from complete version tracking that will enable them to see exactly what changes have been made to each document. It will even be possible to view older versions of the manual and compare differences. Basically, complete wiki-style version control will be available for every manual stored in doQer.

We’re really excited to be rolling out the new functionality. Beta trial participants will be seeing it very soon now…