The Great Documentation Migration

Earlier this year, we made the decision to simplify our server infrastructure and move from our Confluence based documentation on a Java environment to cleaner, simpler documentation on MODX.

By Jay Gilmore  |  Updated: January 24, 2014  |  2 min read
The Great Documentation Migration
Image: 'Wildebeest crossing the Mara river.' from Shutterstock

Earlier this year, we made the decision to simplify our server infrastructure and unburden ourselves from managing and maintaining a Java server for the MODX documentation, which at that time, was in Atlassian Confluence.

Moving from Confluence to MODX was not a simple data migration: we had to keep references intact, we had to maintain URL and image paths and, at the same time, eliminate all of the generated markup produced by Confluence. One of our longer term goals is to enable distributable forms of our documentation, therefore, proprietary markup wasn't going to work.

The new MODX docs have been reimported after major effort on the part of Mike Henry, who went above and beyond the call of duty as a volunteer. This enabled us to import and clean the entire Confluence-based documentation into our new docs built in Revo.

If you're on the geeky/nerdy side of things, this response on using regex to parse HTML is epic and touches on the challenges we faced.

We want to sincerely thank every single volunteer who offered to help manually clean up the documentation and hand-migrate missing sections from one site to the other. Here they are in no particular order:

If you meet them in person or in social media, please thank them.

Next Steps

Now that the MODX Documentation is in MODX (as it arguably should have been all along), we embark on the next phase: dramatic improvement of the content and it's organization. This will enable people to get better, more helpful information when they need it, whether they are starting their first MODX installation, or their 500th site and need to reference Output Filters.

We Need Volunteers

We need help to turn the MODX Documentation into the best it can be. If you are interested in helping improve the documentation in any way, please let us know.