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Solved My 2023 Platform Crisis

OxygenXML FTW

I faced a bit of a platform crisis over the summer.

For the past several years I've been using OxygenXML to generate our help documentation. I genuinely like this tool. It's the most affordable and customizable of any I've found out there, and it's produced by a passionate team of developers who are always working to improve it.

That said, it is not the best website builder. And to be fair, it's not meant strictly as a web publishing tool like a static site generator or WordPress. It is designed for omnichannel publishing ("write once, publish anywhere").

Because my company doesn't produce user documentation in multiple formats, a CCMS is both overly complex and overly powerful for what we need. That led me to test out MkDocs a few months ago. My goal was to remove the XML layer between my content and web output and reduce the complexity in our back end processing.

However, it came to my attention recently that structured content, namely XML/DITA, is well-positioned for emerging technology like AI and chatbots, and that settled it for me.

I'm going to continue using OxygenXML and by extension, DITA, but I'm going to use it better.

Specifically I plan to leverage:

  • Metadata
  • Audience filtering
  • Content reuse (e.g., keyrefs)
  • Created and revised dates

These features will improve personalization, content updates, and content management, among other things.

I'm also going to work harder at customizing WebHelp templates and output.