Hi Jason
I like that idea of using OpenOffice. The nice thing about docbook is that it makes it easy to generate all of the documentation in to HTML at once. I dont know how or if you can script OpenOffice to convert everything to HTML to be published on the web.
What is the advantage of using OpenOffice files, publishing them to HTML over the use of a Wiki?
An immediate advantage of the Wiki over such is a system is the ease of linking between pages. And publishing is instantaneous and easy.
There are a few notes I add here for further distributed thinking:
1. even if DSL access is currently offered at discount prices (at least here in Europe), please don't forget Italy and many other countries around the world, where dial-up access is the only option, or the only affordable/technical option; wiki is perfect for always-on users; eveyone else is most time off-line (me first*);
2. Docbook is an industry standard and using it as is allows easy generating many end-user formats (though I don't know if the local printing house would accept it raw; they used to accept raw PostScript files, a few years ago) at no cost;
3. Docbook can be used as plain 7-bit XML files or stored in a db, and switching between the two is possibile without loss of information (Exercise: provide an algorithm for storing a tree in an SQL database :);
4. For a really powerful WYSIWYG editor try XXE 2.8 by XMLMind (it's a Java application I currently use under Windows and under Linux; standard edition is free; professional edition has collaborative functions active, but is expensive); another powerful XML editor with team work capabilities is the one by Arbortext, but no free edition exist; the advantage in using structure-/semantics-oriented editors for writing large modular pieces of text is apparent;
5. Under Windows, try GemDoc for generating end-user documents given a valid {SGML|XML} Docbook (not perfect); under Linux, usually a full free Docbook toolchain is available (browse the Suse 9 user manual and at about page 2 you'll read it was generated from a Docbook source);
6. Given the proper XLT transformation, CVS or SVN could contain the whole web site, but forums (perhaps); this does not mean I am against eZP, I just suggest we could make the eZP engine extract some information from a static XML base we can access using CVS/SVN;
7. OO files are XML files (well packed and compressed collections of XML files and binary attachments); It seems OO can load simplified Docbook files and export to simplified docbook, which is good for short pieces, but not for a quite large documentation project like ros.
Emanuele
*) this is just an abscure problem of the telco, I suspect, because I live just 10 km (~6 miles) far from the chief town, where the local university has a 122 Mbit/s link and 3G/UMTS for live videocalls is available;