Implementation

See the work in progress for the docsmith reference implementation

Also see the status page and roadmap

Developer Experience

Focus on allowing user to start from a project scaffold:

a Blog (Jekyll compatible) with added “Contribute to this page” links.
a Wiki (Gollum compatible)
a Resource website
a Software documentation site

We could create repos (contentascode-blog, contentascode-wiki, contentascode-site, contentascode-doc) that are ready to clone with some sensible defaults.

The default pipelines would have a travis.yml that push to a gh-pages branch.

We could also look into Grunt-init or Yeoman Project Scaffolding tools to allow configuration of various options such as:

Choice of templating language and other frontend framework choices
Choice of integration backend (Jekyll/Metalsmith/…)
Choice of a theme (Bootstrap and variants, Foundation, GH Pages themes…)
Adoption of metadata schemas (SPAR, Provenance, DigiSec Taxonomy).
Configuration of tools like Prose with good usable defaults.
Enabling of other CI backends (Gitlab CI, Jenkins, Thoughtworks Go,…)
Configuration, integration and deployment (Heroku button style) of micro-services (like commenting, stats,…)

We also need to think about migration and various options to use integrations to facilitate a progressive transition process from CMSes to the content as code approach.

Reference Implementation Matrix

Name	Description	Repo	Editor	Generator	Build	Hosting	Services
scaffold-github-pages	Fork and play.	Github	Prose	Jekyll	Github Pages	Github
scaffold-github-jekyll-travis	With Jekyll and Travis CI	Github	Prose	Jekyll	Travis	Github
scaffold-github-metalsmith-travis	With Metalsmith and Travis CI	Github	Prose	Metalsmith	Travis	Github
scaffold-jekyll-jenkins	Open source stack	Gitlab	Hosted Prose	Jekyll	Jenkins	Self-Hosted
scaffold-metalsmith-gitlabci	Open source stack with metalsmith	Gitlab	Hosted Prose	Jekyll	Gitlab CI	Self-Hosted
infra-heroku	Push to deploy micro-service infra	Gitlab	Hosted Prose	Jekyll	Jenkins	Heroku	Single container
infra-docker	Docker single server micro-service infra						Multi-container
infra-ansible	Distributed micro-service infra						Multi-server

Modularity

Scaffold and infrastructure repos might make some choices with regards to lower level implementation approaches (make vs bash vs gulp…) and it would be good to allow this to be plug and play. i.e. Content as Code should be opinionated with regards to concepts and architecture (and maybe its pivot data format, metadata description and other declarative things about workflow configuration), but not with regards to implementation.

This table aims to represent which components affect which stages of the content as code framework.
- Key : means that this component is a key component for this stage.
- Change : means that this component modifies or applies to this stage.
- +1 component : means that this component works better with another component.
- -1 component : means that this component doesn’t work with another component.

Component \ Stage	Source	Author	Build	Integrate	Translate	Publish
github	Key			+1 travis		+1 gh-pages
gitlab	Key			+1 gitlab-ci
prose	+1 github	Key	+1 jekyll
jekyll			Key
metalsmith			Key
travis				Key
gitlab-ci	-1 github			Key
linkchecker				Change
transifex					Key
gh-pages	+1 github					Key

| Components \ Stages | Store | Edit | Share | Check | Translate | Publish |
|———————|——-|——|——-|——-|———–|———|