Repository
Content is a company's intangible capital. Learn how to choose and manage a documentation repository to protect, version, and share technical content across teams.
Definition
Section titled “Definition”Content is a company’s intangible asset and must be protected accordingly. It can be managed in various repositories, such as directories, enterprise content management tools, and version management software.
Why the choice matters
Section titled “Why the choice matters”The RepositoryThe place where a documentation team keeps its sources: shared folders, a CMS database, or a version-control system such as Git, which also stores the complete history of every file.View in glossary → decides much of what a team can do with its content:
- Working together. Whether two writers can change the same content without one losing the other’s work.
- Recovering content. How precisely a lost or unwanted change can be restored, and by whom.
- Changing everything at once. Whether a change across all files, such as the path of every image, is a single operation.
- Managing versions and languages. How translations and parallel versions of the documentation are organized.
Repositories compared
Section titled “Repositories compared”The question of which repository suits group work is critical: shared network directories present significant limitations, CMS platforms offer workflow convenience but with reliability trade-offs of their own, and version management systems offer a far more reliable alternative.
| Working together | Recovering content | Changing everything at once | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shared network directory | Open files are locked, or the last save overwrites the others | Directory by directory, from backups often only daily | Impossible while files are locked |
| CMS (Content Management System)A tool that adds workflow and file-locking to content management, at the cost of reliability trade-offs compared to plain version control.View in glossary → | Writers download a local copy and upload it; the CMS locks files being modified | Reliability must be tested and backed by a backup strategy | An SQL-based CMS cannot search and replace across all content |
| Version controlRecording every change to a set of files so that any earlier state can be restored, changes can be compared, and several people can work in parallel. Git is the most widely used version-control system; docs-as-code keeps documentation under version control next to the product code.View in glossary → system | Files are not locked; branches let writers work in parallel | Very fine-grained; every Git clone holds the full history | An ordinary operation on text files |
Version control has trade-offs too: it compares files line by line rather than XML node by node, and its paradigm can be challenging for less technologically inclined users. A CMS remains relevant when contributors cannot work with text files and version control.