New ModeShape documentation

Over the past few years, the ModeShape community has put together a simple Getting Started Guide and a much more comprehensive Reference Guide. Our goal for the latter was that it would be an asset for users when trying to figure out ModeShape’s features, how to configure ModeShape, or how and why ModeShape behaves the way it does. And over the years, the Reference Guide has become harder and harder to organize and maintain.

So we’re happy to announce that we’re moving our two guides to the new system for JBoss.org projects. There’s now just one link to the ModeShape documentation:

https://docs.jboss.org/author/display/MODE

There you’ll find documentation for the upcoming 2.7 release (look for it this week!) and the drafts for the 3.0 release (still under heavy development).

The new JBoss.org documentation system is built with Confluence, and we think it is a great improvement over our older DocBook system:

• Readers can leave comments. So please leave a comment if you find a mistake, have a tip for other readers, or want to clarify something. (We do prefer that you still use our forum to ask questions or report problems.)
• Corrections can be made immediately. Right now, only contributors can make changes, but please let us know if you’re interested in contributing.
• Interactive table of contents. The left hand side of the documentation includes a table of contents that you can collapse and expand as needed, and of course every item is a link.
• Search. Yup, there’s a search field that only searches ModeShape documentation.
• Next and previous page links to make it easy to keep reading.
• Version-specific documentation. This is something that the JBoss.org folks have made possible through some clever extensions. When we issue a release, we can copy the documentation for the latest release and create a new set for the upcoming version.
• Outstanding editor. Not everyone will see this, but the contributors are going to love the rich text editor and the really nice wiki markup editor.

In short, lots of great new features. You’re gonna love it.

One more thing

Since the upcoming 2.7 release contains mostly bug fixes, the content for the 2.7 documentation will be pretty similar to the 2.6 release docs, except for some formatting improvements, clarifications, and other minor changes and fixes.

However, for 3.0 we’re doing a major overhaul on the documentation. We’re completely reorganizing the content and trying to make it just as useful for new users just starting out with ModeShape as it is for those experienced users that just need to find the details of a particular feature or behavior. For example, we’re creating a new section that just talks about how to use the JCR API.

Have a look, and let us know what you think!

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