Best way to manage reusable content across multiple DITA maps?

[jogaxo]

Hi everyone,

I'm working on a DITA documentation project with several maps that share common topics, procedures, and reference information. I'm trying to find the best way to organize reusable content without making the structure too difficult to maintain.

I've been looking into using conref, conkeyref, and keys to reuse content across different topics and maps. However, I'm not entirely sure which approach works best when the same content needs to appear in different contexts or when the source topics are organized in separate submaps.

For those of you using oXygen XML Editor for larger DITA projects, how do you usually manage content reuse? Do you prefer keys and key references, or do you rely more on conref and conkeyref? I'd also appreciate any tips on keeping references manageable when the project grows and multiple writers are editing the documentation.

Thanks in advance for sharing your experience!

[Radu]

Hi,

You seem to want the opinion of the Oxygen XML community, the forum is a more static place, there are a handful of users who registered to receive notifications for all posts made by all users.
So you might want to register and post an email on the Oxygen Users List: https://www.oxygenxml.com/mailinglists.html

From our point of view (Oxygen XML team), we use DITA XML for the Oxygen User's Manual:

https://github.com/oxygenxml/userguide

- We use a single map with profiling conditions to produce about 10 user manuals for the Oxygen XML products (XML Editor, XML Author, XML Developer).
- We use keys to define product names, versions (simple text fragments).
- We use plain conrefs to reuse content, content placed in reusable topic files.
- We have separate DITA Maps for our add-ons.

There is also this DITA Project best practices project I wrote some time ago which may be useful to you:
https://github.com/oxygenxml/dita-proje ... -practices

Regards,
Radu