New Features
Articles Editor
- Content Snippets. Now you can replace repeatable parts of topic content with a refence to an article containing the needed content. This can be done by inserting a content snippet, and pointing it to the needed article. When the project is published, the content snippet is replaced with the content of the referenced article.
- Publish Configurations Preview. With this feature, you can see how an article will look like after it is published with a specific publish configuration applied. In this mode, all configuration-specific settings are applied: styles and scripts, custom variable values, etc. All you need is to select a publish configuration in the combo box above the topic editor. The selection is preserved for a project, so you’ll see all articles from that project with the given publish configuration applied. The selection will also apply to the Preview tab of the WYSWYG editor.
- Refresh Button in Articles Editor. Authors can now refresh the current article content without reloading the entire page. The feature is useful when you edit project styles or scripts in a separate browser tab and want to see the changes applied to a specific article quickly.
- The <ch:snippet> Tag is in Code Completion. The Code Completion window shows this tag, and provides a short reference for it.
- Articles Now Load Faster. We’ve done quite a bit of speed optimization to ensure even better reader experience.
Workflow
- Custom Filters for TOC.A small button, a big feature: the quick filter box on top of the TOC panel now allows filtering articles via custom criteria. For example, you can see all Draft articles assigned to you, all articles modified, created or locked by a specific user, etc. The feature allows specifying custom criteria of any complexity, including nested conditions combined via various boolean operators. When a filter is applied, the control is higlighted with yellow, so if you see that the number of displayed articles is lower than expected, you won’t be confused.
- Review Notes Panel. Now, you can have TODO lists, editor comments and other kinds of internal notes associated with each topic. Comments from different users have different colors to make them easier to read.
- E-mail Notifications Implemented. Now, you will be informed when an article is assigned to you or when the status of an article owned by you is changed. The notifications contain links to articles, information on user who made the change, the article’s current status and the latest review comments so you can clearly understand who and why made the change. The notifications behavior can be fine-tuned via global settings.
Settings
- Separate Project Settings Pages. Each settings page now has a unique URL, which makes it possible to open property pages in separate browser tabs, bookmark and re-load specific pages if necessary.
- Separate Global Settings Pages. Will also give some more flexibility.
- Navigation Bar Re-desgined The settings pages now have a nice-looking navigation bar.
- New Global Settings Group: Notifications. Here, you can fine-tune the notification settings to configure when automatic e-mail notifications should be sent to authors, and the number of latest review comments to include in the notification e-mail.
Other Improvements
- Default Home Page Redesigned. Now there is a couple of nice skyscrapers there.
- Application Start Page Redesigned. It got a few additional actions (“Create users” and “Set up branding”), new style and a new background. We love the new look of the page! Do you?
- New TOC Entries go to Bottom. Newly created articles and TOC entries are now placed to the end of the corresponding TOC branch automatically. This change was requested by users, and totally makes sense. The same behavior has been implemented for nodes drag-n-drop operations.
- Splitters Store Their Position All splitter controls in ClickHelp now store their positions in cookies. You no longer need to resize them after each page reload if you preferred panel sizes different from the default ones.
- Configuration Editor is Shown Automatically. The configuration editor wizard is now invoked automatically right after a publish configuration is created for a project. Makes it easier to configure the publish configuration right away.
- Lots of other nice improvements for technical writers!
Fixed Issues
- Newly created articles can now be moved up/down in the TOC tree correctly (were “jumping” unexpectedly in some cases previously).
- Fixed a problem with empty screen appearing instead of the first wizard step when opening the Create Project wizard.
- Fixed problem with uploaded styles and scripts encoded in ANSI or UTF-8. The files are no longer corrupted during upload.
- Trailing spaces in project names no longer cause the “Not Found” error when opening a project. Besides, leading and trailing spaces in project names are now trimmed automatically when a project is created or modified.
- No more issues with cached scripts. All script files in the application now have version-specific links. So, scripts are guaranteed to be updated when a new version of ClickHelp is released.
- Fixed a context menu issue on the Projects page (was not displayed properly on right-click).
- The “Invalid object name ‘mapArticleWidgets'” error no longer occurs when deleting an article.
- When editing custom markup for a server page (for example, the Home page) in the Source view on the Branding page, checking the “Use custom markup below” option no longer causes a JavaScript error.
- When navigating between articles, the Back browser button now acts correctly (had to click it twice to navigate to the previous article before).
- When renaming a publish configuration and the new name does not differ from the old name, an error message regarding duplicated configuration names is no longer displayed.
- The selected publish configuration is now preserved when switching back to the first step of the Publish Project wizard. Previously, the configurations combo box was cleared in this case.
- Fixed a problem with article lock warning appearing for a second when switching between articles quickly.
- When an invalid article URL was specified in the Insert/Change Link dialog in the WYSIWYG editor, an error icon with a hint indicating an invalid URL now appears (was not shown previously).
- Quick filter box in TOC now handles strings containing the ‘[‘, ‘]’ and ‘%’ chars correctly.
- Fixed a problem with Google Analytics code not applying to article pages correctly.
- Fixed a problem with article ratings calculated incorrectly.
- Recent Documents panel height adjusted to fit its container panel without showing scrollbars.
- The height of auto-hide panels in Article Editor no longer decreases after multiple clicks on auto-hide tabs.
- Articles can no longer be assigned to Power Readers. Also, Power Readers cannot be set as article owners.
- TOC nodes were not expanded and collapsed automatically when using quick filter in the article selection dialog invoked from the Insert Link dialog of WYSIWYG HTML editor.
- Fixed a problem with sudden articles content disappearance. The problem occurred when the Insert Link dialog was open in the WYSIWYG HTML editor and the article content was saved via the auto-save mechanism. If the article was not saved again after that, the article content was cleared and the article appeared as empty when opened for the next time.