At our meeting two Wednesdays ago, my colleague Leona Campbell shared her experiences taking an Advanced DITA class, which led into an interesting discussion of what post-basic DITA education means these days. Anecdotally, it seems early adopters of DITA have tended to be self-educated fearless types who are comfortable learning from the spec and reaching out to user groups for help from other highly technical users. DITA workshops and classes, however, often seem to cover the concepts of structured and topic-based authoring, what the DITA OT is, and some simple authoring and conversion tasks: they also tend to have a focus on migration, probably because so many DITA projects start with the problem of moving all the old junk out of whatever format it’s in. Finally, there’s often an evangelical component, because it’s no small thing to stop doing whatever you were doing before, and do something as skills-intensive as DITA instead.

However, as DITA matures, its users are a more diverse crowd with more diverse needs. (For example, all three of us writers at Jive Software inherited an existing DITA implementation rather than spearheading a migration.) In our discussion, we said we’d like to see some classes covering the structure of the toolkit and how it can/should be modified for real life implementations. Some more ideas that were floated:

• What are the best practices for file setup?
• How should you plan for upgrades?
• Is it realistic to store all your files in the same directory?
• How do you know when you need a CMS, and if you haven’t sold your company on having one yet, are there any best practices to avoid making it harder when you finally do?
• How do filtered builds work and what are some useful examples?
• What are some common mistakes of DITA implementation and how could you avoid them?

What would YOU like to learn/wish you had learned from DITA training, versus the school of hard knocks? Feel free to respond here.