Blog

To improve your experience on LearningDITA.com, we are moving the site to a faster server on July 13, 2018.

The site will be offline beginning at 8 a.m. EDT that day. Thank you for your patience during site migration.

Questions? Contact us at experts@learningdita.com.

Did you miss any of the sessions during the LearningDITA Live 2018 web event? You can watch recordings in the new course we just published.

Thank you to the sponsors, guest presenters, and attendees who made the event a huge success.

Learn all about the Learning DITA project in a Content Strategy Experts podcast:

• What was the business case for developing the free e-learning resource?
• How is the LearningDITA.com site put together?
• What went well—and didn’t!—as the project grew into sites in multiple languages?

Listen today.

The LearningDITA project is now available in Chinese at learningdita.cn. The Shanghai Association of Technical Communicators has translated several courses and plans to translate more.

Many thanks to the SATC for providing this valuable resource!

Prefer your DITA training in German? Visit our new sister site,  LearningDITA.de.

parson AG translated the English content in the DITA training GitHub project to develop the site.

Interested in creating more Learning DITA sites in other languages? Contact us.

The courses on LearningDITA.com build upon each other. The site required you take courses in a particular order—until now!

The description at the start of each course lists the prerequisite courses. Although we recommend you take those courses, you are no longer required to do so. We recognize that you may have gained required knowledge elsewhere, so jump right in where you want to start!

As always, we welcome your feedback.

Take our new DITA map and bookmap course and learn how to collect topics. Establish relationships among with them reltables.

Like all the free courses on LearningDITA.com, the maps course includes guided step-by-step practice and exercises to help you learn DITA.

Questions? Contact us. We welcome your feedback!

Special thanks to LearningDITA.com sponsors: oXygen XML Editor, The Content Wrangler,  and easyDITA.

LearningDITA.com is offering four free courses right now:

• Introduction to DITA: Six-lesson course gets you started with the basics of DITA. A prerequisite for all other courses.
• The DITA concept topic type: Five-lesson course introduces you to the DITA concept topic type. A prerequisite for courses on the task topic and the reference and glossary topic types.
• The DITA task topic type: Five-lesson course introduces you to the DITA task topic type.
• The DITA reference and glossary topic types: Four-lesson course introduces you to the DITA reference, glossary entry, and glossary group topic types.

We hope you find the free DITA training useful!

Thanks to everyone who signed up for the site and took the Introduction to DITA course. That course offers an overview on how to develop different types of information in DITA—concept, task, reference, and glossary.

Want more details about creating those specific information types? Never fear! We are releasing three new courses.

Creating concepts (September 2015)

• Introduction
• Lesson 1: Commonly used elements
• Lesson 2: Images and tables
• Lesson 3: More elements
• Lesson 4: More advanced elements
• Lesson 5: Best practices for concepts

Creating tasks (October 2015)

• Introduction
• Lesson 1: Creating a task topic
• Lesson 2: Creating steps
• Lesson 3: Finishing up the task
• Lesson 4: Best practices for tasks

Creating glossaries and references (November 2015)

• Introduction
• Lesson 1: Creating a glossentry
• Lesson 2: Creating a reference topic
• Lesson 3: Best practices for glossaries and references

Course outlines and release dates are subject to change; we were still in development mode at the time of this post.

Questions? Please contact us.

The first course on LearningDITA.com is now live: Introduction to DITA.

The course includes six lessons:

1. What is DITA?
2. DITA topics
3. Metadata
4. Creating DITA content
5. Tables
6. Creating relationships among topics

Lessons include code samples, links to additional resources and videos, and more. There is a quiz at the end of each lesson.

Sign up today! It’s free!