Vinci Part #10 - Updating Website Articles

Over the years, RemObjects Software has accumulated a lot of online articles and I do mean a lot. The big problem for me is that they were written at different times and our software never stops evolving, so many are out of date to a greater or lessor degree.
So, all hands to the pump to get things sorted, but this then presented a different challenge – how to manage it without taking all the existing articles offline?

We solved this by creating two issues in our bug database for each affected article (existing and planned new ones). A ‘prepare’ issue manages all the potential changes and the ‘publish’ issue handles the actual update including creation of the attached pdf file etc.

With updates occurring over a matter of weeks and with several people involved, this was likely to be rather confusing to our customers, so we needed to make it very obvious as to the status of each article.

Accordingly, each article that we have examined to see if it needs changes for ‘Vinci’ contains an unmissable image in its top right hand corner and they can be one of the following:

• ready for ‘Vinci’
• update pending
• TeamRO contribution
• external contribution
• legacy article

Thus, unless you see ‘update pending’ displayed within an article, you can be sure that we are not currently working on it. Note: at the time of writing we have not added icons to all articles yet – we are still working through them – as I said, we have a lot of articles!

To help you filter articles, we have also added ‘ready for Vinci’, ‘update pending’ and ‘legacy’ categories (contributions already existed).

We have many new articles planned but it would be premature for me to mention them by name. Keep your eyes on our website – they will be published as they are ready.