Changes to the way we publish Cloud Foundry documentation

[Elisabeth Hendrickson]

Greetings!

The docs currently hosted at http://docs.cloudfoundry.com are generated from the cf-docs repo (http://github.com/cloudfoundry/cf-docs) and hosted using github pages.

We’ve been transitioning to a new way of publishing the docs. You can see the current draft of the new Cloud Foundry open source documentation on the staging site at:

http://docs-cloudfoundry-staging.cfapps.io/

We plan to transition the production public Cloud Foundry docs site to the new content and publication method soon as part of the migration to docs.cloudfoundry.org. Feedback on the format and content welcome!

There are two big changes in our approach to documentation that you might care about if you ever submit pull requests on the docs: 

1. Instead of hosting the docs as a github site, we're hosting them as an app hosted on run.pivotal.

2. We’re taking a more modular approach, breaking topics out into separate repos instead of keeping everything in cf-docs.

If you look at the README at http://github.com/cloudfoundry/docs-book-cloudfoundry you’ll see a list of the topic repositories used to generate the open source doc set.

This more modular approach to documentation has necessitated building a new tool on top of middleman: bookbinder. This tool is also open source. See https://github.com/pivotal-cf/docs-bookbinder

Using multiple modular repositories is a little more complicated than the old way of doing things, but it enables us to pull all the commercial content out of the open source documentation. Further, this modular approach allows partners and distributors of Cloud Foundry to pull just the documentation modules they need into their blended offerings. So I hope you will see this as being a good change. 

I’m happy to answer questions or hear feedback of any kind about this change in how we publish docs.

Many thanks for your continued involvement in Cloud Foundry!

Enjoy,

Elisabeth

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Elisabeth Hendrickson

Cloud Foundry

[Dr Nic Williams]

Thanks E for moving forward with this new modular approach!

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[Wayne E. Seguin]

Hooray for modular documentation!!!