The Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) is an XML-based standard for written communication that is gathering momentum in global organizations. This presentation looks at the planning and development tasks required to implement a DITA authoring solution. Planners of a DITA implementation should determine their specific metadata needs, define templates, customize the toolkit output formatting, and formulate a re-use strategy as part of the planning and development process. This presentation is based on a case study of an actual DITA implementation where custom metadata, templates, configurations and filters were used to create a tailor-made and efficient authoring system using the ditabase DTDs.

This presentation is geared towards project planners, information architects and developers who are interested in implementing DITA.

1. Planning a base DITA project
2. Providing map templates
3. Defining metadata and modifying user interface controls
4. Customizing the DITA toolkit formatting
5. Defining conditional text and filtering conditions