The tech writers were looking for a more sophisticated way to deliver our product user manuals, but had no access to in-house IT resources or funds for contractors. Since DW is easy to install and customize, I, a writer, was able to build our CMS using DW without relying on IT support.

Our two big priorities were translations and static content management. For translations, DW's flat-file system appealed to us, since it's easy to send a zip of text files to the translation company, then dump the translated files into their respective directories without further effort required. Database-driven CMS tend to require a lot of copying and pasting to activate localized versions. As for static content management, the include plugin offered us all the functionality we required.

We looked carefully at other open source CMS, especially Drupal and Joomla, and decided that DW offered the simplest solution for managing translations.

Our implementation of DW I believe is an interesting example of how DW can be arm-wrestled into behaving like a traditional CMS, especially one with many (8-10) localizations. Our wiki is completely read-only to non-employees, but lets tech writers in multiple locations collaborate on documentation.

Note: To view the live wiki, go to lacie.com > [choose any recent product] > click the “Documents” tab > click “User Manual”. If it's a PDF instead of a URL, choose a different product (manuals for older products were built in indesign and delivered as PDFs).

csutton