Hi Ross Thanks for getting back to me. Answers are as follows:
>How and where are your publications stored? Existing publications are simply stored as files on my network drive. In general, they are fairly typical word processor/html editor outputs. >What schema are they? I converted the above pubs to well-formed xml using sx and python but they do not comply to any particular schema. Obviously, they could be made to conform to, say, docbook or xdoc. >Do they contain any navigation information (other than inline links)? The documents contain only the content for the given page. Navigation in the current pubs is provided by a javascript toc and next/last links provided from the xsl transform and a reference xml file. It is not necessary to preserve any of the navigation as the plan is to re-build it in Forrest and allow editors to provide additional page linking via Lenya as deemed fit. >Can they be moved/restructured if necessary? Absolutely, right now I have a large collection of well-formed but otherwise undefined xml. >Why Forrest? 1) We are already using Xalan as our xml processor and Fop to generate pdf output. It seemed reasonable to stay in the apache sandbox. 2) It seems that Forrest allows the user to quickly build up a publication that utilizes an XML source, provides the ability to create static or dynamic output, handles navigation and style, provides common functionalities (i.e. search). I'd like to minimize the amount of time spent on the mechanics of the site. 3) We have a requirement to produce platform independent, standards compliant output. >Why Lenya? Our pubs have many variations but also contain redundant material. Subject matter experts can work in Lenya to update/edit/author content in a WYSIWYG environment without being required to know/understand anything about XML. We also need to track revisions, plan work, allow comments, etc. >Why not stick with your existing approach? The existing approach is basically word processing and WYSIWYG html editor tools. We have a requirement produce XML-based pubs. >How often do you wish to publish the content? It varies but changes to the baseline configuration are common and, at the moment, a major headache and cause of delay. >How is the content served? Ultimately the pubs are detached from the network and live on cd-rom (so static). In the future we may see deployment on a Linux server but there is no requirement for that at the moment. >One thing you should be aware of when considering the sanity is that Forrest is a 0.7 product. It is not complete and future versions may change quite considerably, thus migration between versions may require some work. Having said that, we do try and maintain backward compatability and many of users and devs use Forrest in production environments. As I said, I've been happy with the level of support from apache via the mailing lists, web sites, and wiki. Forrest will be mainly for my own use in order to create or port pubs into Lenya. I'm willing to accept the risk of Forrest being pre-release. There is a high degree of enthusiasm for Lenya in my group among those that have tried it, so Forrest seems like the right choice for the future as it is likely to play well with Lenya. Chris
