Let's start today with some great news - we have just released the ClickHelp Oasis update! And yes, it is going to be just as rejuvenating and feature-packed as it sounds. All our existing clients will be updated automatically - we’ll notify them about the upgrade schedule beforehand.
Now, let's take a closer look at what there's to be excited about!
Global Find and Replace
The first insanely helpful feature Oasis is going to bring you is Global Find and Replace. This is another huge leap towards supreme usability. It will now become possible to find and replace text (including source HTML code), topic links, file links, CSS class names and more!
You will be able to search for all these things almost everywhere inside your portal: topics HTML source, style files, script files, ToDo items, Index keywords, TOC node titles, Unresolved/Resolved/Deleted review comments. This is super convenient!
But here’s more - you can use extra filters when searching for text, like: match case, match whole words, use regular expressions. The results of the search can be exported for preview with match highlighting, so you can act on them later.
As for replacing - you can either choose to replace all matches automatically or manually pick the ones you would like to be changed.
Even if you replace something important and need to cancel that, it is possible - the system will automatically create a Version History record for Topics for each replacement you perform.
How can you make the most of this brand new feature?
- Use Global Find and Replace for post-import cleanups. Manually removing third-party master page markup, inline styles or scripts is painful, but it’s gone now since we have this feature!
- Changing CSS class names, deleting classes or finding unused classes is a walk in a park thanks to the new functionality!
- Search for a specific word/phrase or a source code snippet and then replace it with a variable, snippet, or conditional block.
- Should you need to rename variables or output tags - now you can do this using the Global Find and Replace feature.
- Going through rebranding? Find and replace colors or fonts in all your style files in one go!
- And that’s just a few examples of how you can use this feature. Tell us about your ideas in the comments below!
A very nice addition to this brilliant feature is the automatic link validation and update functionality, available in ClickHelp Oasis. This means that the system will look for all links when a topic or file URL changes and suggest updating them automatically.
More Accessibility
We are proud to tell you that ClickHelp reader UI becomes even more accessible with this new update. We've been working hard on this aspect and, now, the reader interface ClickHelp displays to your readers is compliant with two major accessibility standards: WCAG 2.0 Level AA and Section 508.
This is a very important topic we would like to be more vocal about - making technical documentation accessible to as many people as possible. We have been talking about inclusiveness in this blog as well and we'll keep doing this, so stay tuned.
New Beautiful Reader UI Templates
Since we are creating a help authoring tool for technical writers who are going to create a ClickHelp portal for their readers to see, we are always trying to balance out the two aspects of our tool: the author interface and the reader interface. Both are equally important.
So, after we just told you about this awesome Global Find and Replace usability update, we have to pull something special for the readers too. And we do have a thing or two up our sleeves!
With the ClickHelp Oasis update, we are bringing you more great opportunities to configure the reader UI to your taste and requirements. The update includes over 30 new settings and ready reader interface templates to choose from!
You can create publications that will have different main menus for readers. This can be achieved by selecting custom items to be displayed. You can fine-tune the menus in a brand new Reader Menu Editor.
Menu items can be assigned custom styles (you can turn them into buttons or images, for example) in ClickHelp Oasis and the same works for their child items! Which means that if you have several products with different branding and multiple user manuals, you can make them all look different. For example, a Knowledge Base and a User Guide in one portal can have different Reader Layout to provide different navigation types. Also, products can have unique docs with various logos and colors of UI interfaces.
New settings are added to the portal UI layout. They can be applied to the whole portal or specific publications. Now, you are getting a big variety of final layouts — choose a predefined layout and modify it to meet your needs through options. A layout without a TOC, a layout with a big banner in the header - it is all possible in ClickHelp Oasis and more!
Featured Snippets
Before we wrap this overview up, there's one more feature we would like to give a special mention - featured snippets. The portal Search page is what your readers use a lot to get answers. With the Featured Snippets function, they can see their answers right on the Search page even without opening a topic! This is what it looks like for the readers:
As an author, you can define which topics will be displayed this way and which topics will not - you control this in the topic properties. If you have this setting enabled for a specific topic, and it appears in the Top 10 search results, it will be displayed as a Featured Snippet.
As a reminder, the ClickHelp Full-Text Search engine takes into account the Index Keywords when indexing the content. If you want some topic to be shown as a Featured Snippet for a specific search query, just add that query to the Index Keywords list for that topic.
Featured Snippets is an additional way you can help your readers find what they’re looking for in your documentation portal!
Conclusion
We have mentioned the most outstanding features of the Oasis update in this article, however, the new release is much more than that! The latest update contains many usability and performance improvements that will make your technical writing experience even more enjoyable!
You can find a full list of all changes the update brings to ClickHelp here: What’s New in ClickHelp Oasis .
To take a look at ClickHelp Oasis features and give them a try, request a free trial:
If you’re an existing ClickHelp client, your portal will be upgraded to the Oasis version in January 2020. We will send more information on portal upgrade schedule over email in January.
We hope you are going to enjoy all the great stuff the ClickHelp Oasis update is bringing to the table. In our turn, we will keep working on perfecting our documentation platform and, as always, your feedback is much appreciated. Thank you and good luck with your technical writing!
Good luck with your technical writing!
ClickHelp Team
Author, host and deliver documentation across platforms and devices