Doctypes define document properties and document sections. Each property may have a value or not, each section may have content or not.

If a property has no value or a section has no content, it is not rendered. Therefore a doctype is not a template that requires to be filled out. It is a tool to guide authors to create new documents based on the team's conventions.

Authors may add new properties and sections and remove all non-mandatory properties and all sections, if they think these do not apply. But since empty content is not displayed to the reader, it is good practice to leave them in the template. If in the future a new information has to be added, the author still has the guidance provided by the doctype to add it to the location defined by the team's convention.

Doctypes not only provide a basic structure by the use of properties and sections. They also provide a wizard that supports authors to create documents. A wizard is a step by step guidance to collect information to be added to the new document.

Agile documentation proposes to have documentation that is

1. valuable - has a stakeholder that is in need for the information
2. essential - contains only the required information for the stakeholder
3. timely - create just-in-time for the stakeholder

With this in mind it is important to be able to define the doctypes according to the team's requirements. Therefore all our doctype add-ons are available for free on the Marketplace and are published with an open source license on Bitbucket. Feel free to use them as a basis to define your own set of doctypes.

If you need only minor changes to the doctypes, which especially do not require changes to the blueprint wizard, you may simply edit the installed templates of the free doctypes.

Please note that we are constantly working on the doctypes. Make sure that you understand the additional work you have to invest in developing your own version of the doctypes.