[SeasonOfDocs] formats, tools, workflows

[Jennifer Rondeau]

Hi all,

Cameron asked me to follow up on my comment at the end of our last video
conference about the fact that the Write the Docs website publishes with
Sphinx -- using Read the Docs, which in case anybody isn't familiar is also
Eric's project -- from mostly reStructuredText format in the repository
(there's still some markdown, but much of it has been moved over to rST).

I mentioned the WtD toolchain because Erin's also mentioned Docsy, which is
Hugo and therefore requires markdown. We've also discussed templates, but
not really mentioned a markup language for said templates (unless I've
missed something, which is a distinct possibility :-)).

It's my hope that we can find a way to provide tools, templates, and best
practices guides without requiring consumers of our efforts to focus on the
markup language. Within the WtD community, there's considerable interest in
AsciiDoc as well as rST and Markdown.

But I don't have definite ideas about how to address the situation -- at
least not yet. The only way forward I see *at the moment* -- while we
figure out solutions -- is to work in Markdown in one of the repos in the
Good Docs Project GH org, probably the structure repo.

Some fragments/thoughts about parts of how we might proceed (nothing
mutually exclusive or complete):

   - keep some of our content and templates in TGDP repo and publish to
   HTML that we can incorporate into the WtD website
   - write wrapper rST content in the /guide directory in the WtD repo
   - write most of our content in rST in the WtD /guide directory but point
   to other resources that we also maintain (as well as resources we don't
   maintain?)
   - build a sample Docsy project in a separate repo that demonstrates
   specific Hugo/markdown best practices (although I think the Docsy project
   already has a fair amount of this worked out -- but we could build on it
   and point back to TGDP pages)
   - do something similar to the previous item for AsciiDoc/Asciidoctor
   (get someone heavily involved in this community to contribute here -- or we
   could point to analogous resources elsewhere)
   - produce templates written in all three lightweight markup languages
   (with appropriate gotchas for differences, including differences in flavors
   of Markdown)
   - Produce SSG-specific variants on templates (this is a variation on the
   previous item)

I ... think that's enough for now. I hope it's enough to show primarily why
I raised the issue this early in the project, and I hope it helps everybody
who's interested continue to brainstorm about how we want to move forward.

See you all online/in video!

Jennifer
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