Migrating to Pressgang CCMS

When FuseSource was originally acquired by Red Hat, back in September 2012, we brought with us half a dozen git repos containing our documentation source in DocBook 5 format. We soon discovered that Red Hat had quite a different documentation infrastructure and tool chain from the homegrown tools we used at FuseSource.  In particular, a Content Management System (CMS) called Pressgang CCMS (a topic-based CMS) was shaping up to the be future of documentation in Red Hat

Initially, migrating to Pressgang CCMS posed some challenges that we were not in a position to solve right away. So, we put the migration off for a while. Now that we have released JBoss Fuse 6.1, we have the time to tackle it at last. Since we first looked at Pressgang CCMS a year and a half ago, a lot of things have changed. In particular, it is now much easier to import documentation into Pressgang using its built-in import tool. Support for DocBook5, XML entities, and conditional text have also been added, which makes migration a lot easier.

But we found it hard to face saying 'goodbye' to git revision control. Git offers us a number of features not available in Pressgang CCMS. Conversely, Pressgang CCMS also provides features not available in git.

Advantages of using Git

Here are some of the advantages that git offers us when managing documentation:

• Branching
• Ability to detect and merge conflicting changes made by different
  writers to the same topics.
• Commits [that is, the capability to save a set of related changes in
  multiple topics in one atomic operation]
• Simplified workflow for integrating and merging upstream Community docs,
  when those docs are in DocBook format.
• Cherry-picking bug fixes across branches
• Ability to grep/sed/find/apply any script to the entire doc set in a
  single operation, when needed.
• Ability to commit changes when working offline.

Advantages of using Pressgang

On the other hand, Pressgang has some pretty nice features too:

• Ability to share topics across all Red Hat products
• Querying for metadata on topic re-use
• Automatic book builds and continuous book building
• Integration with Zanata translation software and localization processes
• Centralized quality checks [spelling, link-checking, compliance with style guide]

Having it all

The solution to this dilemma, evidently, is to have your cake and eat it too. What if we had a tool that created a bridge between git and Pressgang CCMS, so that our documentation source could be moved freely back and forth between them? We have been working on such a tool over the past few months: a python script called GitCCMS. That will be the subject of the next blog post.