These last days, we were looking for a documentation system for the upcoming Phraseanet release. We were used to build the documentation on an old and fixed Microsoft-like documentation system (sometimes called Windows-Help).

We needed a tool that can handle multilingual documentation, easy to use, flexible and easy to transform (HTML, PDF, ….).

We tried many wikis. It was not flexible enough. Export methods were particularly very weak. Until we had a look at ReStructured Text. We now love it !

It is as easy as a wiki to start. The multilingual difficult was solved with multiple documentation roots – one per language. The build is managed by one Makefile wrote with the help of CakePHP ( thank you http://mark-story.com/posts/view/creating-multi-language-documentation-with-sphinx )

Here’s the result : https://github.com/alchemy-fr/Phraseanet-Docs, you can see the html build at http://docs.phraseanet.com

More resources to start your project : http://sphinx.pocoo.org/tutorial.html