It is now one year since we started developing DITA Users. We wish you a Happy New Year for 2008! To celebrate we are restoring free memberships in DITA Users!
Since we started charging for new memberships, member growth has been very slow. We have added only about 30 new members since October 1, 2007. While we think the annual fee is small considering the benefits, it is obviously not small enough.
When DITA Users Beta membership was free, we grew quickly to nearly 400 members (from 24 countries).
We would like to restore free memberships and get more people starting with DITA and topic-based writing.
A free membership will include the DITA Storm browser-based editor and online DITA Open Toolkit. A workspace folder will have the three sample docsets. It will not include our new WebDAV access to support desktop DITA editors.
A full $100/year membership now includes the choice of the leading book on DITA or a desktop DITA Editor to complement the web-based DITA Storm editor.
The book (a $50 value) is JoAnn Hackos' Introduction to DITA - either the original edition by Kylene Bruski and Jennifer Linton or the new Arbortext Edition.
The desktop editor is the $48 Academic Edition of the <oXygen/> XML Editor, now at version 9 with full DITA support.
Desktop editors communicate with web servers via FTP or WebDAV (distributed authoring and versioning). DITA Users can now WebDAV enable individual members' workspace folders.
DITA Users was delighted to learn that SyncRO Soft <oXygen/> supports WebDAV in their $48 Academic Edition. They made an agreement with SyncRO Soft to offer an Academic License to DITA Users for learning DITA online.
Anyone with a WebDAV-enabled DITA authoring tool can use it on their DITA Users document sets. These include two docsets from IBM and the docset from Comtech Services in the Introduction to DITA book. They can also create their own projects.
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