This week we unveiled a new website driven by the Apache CMS!

Last year at ApacheCon 2010, the Infrastructure team announced they had developed a new CMS using plain old markdown and backed by SVN. This new system is all driven by commits and generates and publishes content instantly. Finally, it is easier to just write the documentation and immediately publish it than draft up a big long email and create a TODO to someday log into Confluence and paste in the content. When you live, eat, and breath on the command line and in your IDE, being able to edit your documentation there is a dream.

A major advantage of this new system is to be able to freely mix docs and code in all sorts of creative ways, never have to wait for publishing delays to deliver answers to users in the form of fresh documentation, and the simplicity of plain old text editing in any way you might want to do it. So far we've generated content using Perl, Java, Bash and heavy amount of just plain editing in Emacs or Intellij. It's been quite nice. You hardly need any "plugins" when you have direct access to the documentation source on a plain old file system.

We're rather excited about some of the new content. Some items of note:

While the site overall looks great, there still is some content that is badly formatted. If you find any such content, please point it out and we'll fix it, or better yet, send a patch!