deep gray sea
sites and systems: WRQ WordFactory
May 8, 2004 One of my favorite development projects at WRQ was the WordFactory technical note publishing system. I designed and built this to help technical writers update hundreds of technical articles on the WRQ support website. I worked closely with the writers, and authored a few articles myself to get a better feel for the application. WordFactory went live in 1999, has been well-maintained and is still in production use at WRQ.
Title and Summary Tab
When I got together with the writers early on to talk about what they wanted, what everyone said was they wanted to write using Microsoft Word, but then be able to publish their documents on the web, as plain text, or whatever, and also build indexes and navigation and all from them. So I built a publishing framework around Word using Access and Visual Basic. Writers used styles to indicate indentation and formatting, and WordFactory would navigate through the document, creating HTML from it. This image shows the main WordFactory Document Screen, with the Title tab visible. Documents are the main content entity in WordFactory. View full size image...
Publication Tab
A writer creates a document via the WordFactory application, setting title, summary, date, author and publication details. WordFactory then creates the bones of a new Word document for the writer. The writer then adds details to the document, including relationships to other documents and indexes, images, code samples, lists. At any time, a writer can elect to view the document in one of the output formats. This image shows the Publication tab of the Document screen, which is used to note details about when and for whom this document may be published. View full size image...
Job Jar
Once a document is written and reviewed, it is scheduled for production. The Job Jar handles details of a production run, producing all scheduled documents for batch upload. This image shows the Job Run tab, which was used to configure and launch a scheduled job run. The transmogrifier produced static documents using a common formatting template. It was very satisfying to create a transmogrifier. It's a bit tough to tell from the screenshots, but the WordFactory icon is an overturned cardboard box. View full size image...
Many Screens
Finally, here is a busy shot showing most of the WordFactory screens all at the same time. The Schedule tab of the Job Jar screen is shown in the foreground. View full size image...
About WRQ
WRQ is a software development and consulting firm with offices in Seattle, Singapore and Holland.
Their best known product is the Reflection series of terminal emulators.