Which type of platform is best for developer documentation?

At the Write The Docs event in London last night, Gergely Imreh presented Resin.io’s approach to customer-driven docs – documentation as self service support. Resin.io is a software company that provides Linux containers to the Internet of Things. It sees itself as a support-driven organisation, and so documentation is very important to them.

The discussions at the end of the talk were around which type of platform is best for developer documentation.

Resin.io uses an in-house system, based on Markdown and a flat-file publishing tool. They build pages from “partials” (snippets of re-usable chunks of information) to create “parametric information”. Pages can be built to match different criteria. For example, using Resin.io on a Raspberry Pi and Node.js. It provides an authoring environment that is easy for developers to use; it doesn’t require a database-driven CMS; and the content can be treated in a similar way to the code. The challenge with this type of system is getting it to scale. The “intelligence” of the system is through storing content in folders and using scripts within pages. As the grows, they are finding it harder to manage.

Gergely said he’d like see if a wiki-based system would work better. Content would be easier to edit, as pages would be more self-contained.

Kristof van Tomme suggested using a database-driven CMS. Pages would be built “on the fly”, by the CMS. In this situation, the “intelligence” of the system is through metadata wrapped around each topic and the database software that’s managing the content. The downside is it can mean there might be challenges in moving it to another platform at some stage in the future. You also have to manage the database and protect the CMS  from potential hacking.

Another suggestion was to use a semantic language to write the content. This could be AsciiDoc or DITA. In this situation, the “intelligence” is placed in the topics and with the writers: they “markup” sentences or paragraphs for each applicable parameter, such as audience and computer. These can be published as flat files or be managed by a database. This approach is scalable and tools-independent, but it requires much more work by the writers.

What’s best depends partly on your view of the problem. Is it a information design problem, a software problem, or a data management problem? There are pros and cons to each approach.