I have begun the authoring of the Context Sensitive Help (CSH) text using the OPV book facility (see http://www.openvpms.org/documentation/csh ) and I now know enough about how Drupal works so that I can make the following observations:

1. The authoring side works well and allows for community support
2. We can build the pages with the URL aliases required so that pressing F1 on an OPV screen invokes the appropriate page
3. We can build a book that should be able to become a release appropriate depository of documentation and information
4. I do not currently have a solution for how to clone the 1.7 release CSH data to become the basis of the 1.8 version.
5. We really need to solve the above problem before we go much further. If we cannot solve it using the Drupal platform, then we need to adopt another way of building the CSH pages.
6. Because of 4 above, I also do not know how an integrator would go about copying the CSH data so that they can tailor it for a given practice.

The Drupal copy book and copy subtree facilities do the following:

• copies the title and text of the page
• leaves the links to the pictures as is (ie it does not create a copy of the picture)
• leaves the URL links as is (ie if we use relative links like ../concepts/tills then these will work correctly and access the correct page in the new version)
• replaces the URL aliases with one automatically generated from the page title.  This really screws things up because it changes them from what the OPV code requires.

To address the last problem we need a way of copying the stuff and modifying every alias of the form xxx/1.7/xxx to xxx/1.8/xxx

Since I do not have access to the Drupal admin functions, I can't play with its export facility.  However, if we are lucky, then it may be possible to export the 1.7 subtree, then edit the resulting file(s) to change every 1.7 to a 1.8, and then import this as the 1.8 subtree.

If we can get this to work then we will have solved the 'how to clone release N+1 from release N' problem.  However, we will not have solved the 'how to export for localisation' problem - unless of course we tell the integrator to use his own Drupal installation.

If we used a plain old web server platform (with no Drupal or other CMS) then the clone for new version and clone for localisation processes are dead simple - just FTP out the appropriate directories.  However going down this route means that we lose the nice authoring facilities that Drupal gives us and we move outside the current (and familiar) OpenVPMS documentation platform.

So - is it possible to solve the 'clone for new release' problem and stay with Drupal. If we cannot, then I think that we have to move to the plain old server pages solution - and we need to do this before I create lots more stuff in the Drupal platform.

Comments please.

Regards, Tim G