ClickHelp User Manual

Release Notes: July 2022 — Echo

New Echo release from ClickHelp with machine translation support, import from Confluence, Full-Text Search, XLIFF import/export, and other valuable features.

New Features

Full-Text Search

New search experience with redesigned UI, streamlined and improved UX for the Search Page and Quick Search.
Fuzzy search: If no results are found for the given query, the system uses smart adjustments and replacements to get as many results as possible with minimal changes to the meaning of the query.
Suggested search: the system suggests top search queries similar to those typed in the search box. The similarity check includes typo correction.
Predictive search: the system suggests the most probable search term you refer to even if you have not yet entered the term entirely.
Typo and spelling correction: if there is a typo or a spelling error in the search query, it is corrected automatically considering several factors.
Search as you type: you no longer have to press Enter or click a button to trigger the search action; you get relevant search results before you finish typing the query.
"Sort by" functionality: allows sorting search results by their modification date or relevance.
If an exact phrase search query returns zero results, the system attempts an automatic search "without quotes" and smart-corrects the query further if needed.
If no results are found for the specified language, the engine automatically attempts to find results in other languages.
A new project setting allows hiding the entire project or a publication from the search results.
A new portal setting allows hiding the filter by functionality from the Search Page.

Translation Management

Machine translation support. It is now possible to translate individual units, entire topics, entire projects, or any arbitrary sets of translation documents (e.g., all projects for a specific language) easily. The functionality includes:
- Support for two popular MT engines: Google Cloud Translation and Microsoft Translator.
- Words/characters content metrics that allow you to estimate the translation price according to the third-party service terms before starting the operation.
- Automatic content filtering based on document statuses and unit states — the system will ignore documents and units with the Ready/Review statuses/states.
- Automatic unit state and document status updates — topics and units translated with MT are set to the Review status/state.
- Translated content optimization: the system filters out formatting data from the translated content to ensure you only pay for text translation.
- You can configure multiple machine translation engines in your portal and select which one to use in each case. The selection is preserved in your user profile, so you don't have to do it every time.
You can now download translations from and upload them to ClickHelp in XLIFF format.
Fuzzy matching: if a translation unit's new text does not differ significantly from its previous version, the translation is now preserved. Also, the unit's state is set to Review if it was Final and the changes were minor (like formatting, case, or whitespace changes) and reset to Needs Translation in case of significant changes only.
The publications list on the Home Page now displays publications in the selected language even if the translated version of the Home Page for that language has not been published.
Reader UI is now available in three more languages: Italian, Swedish and Finnish.
Web Help interface is now localized according to the publication language (if ClickHelp UI supports such language).
Create Translation wizard updated to indicate available translation options — translation in ClickHelp, machine translation, translation with other tools — after creating a translation project.

Import

Native import from Atlassian Confluence. The feature allows you to replace person-years of content migration with a few clicks and includes the following capabilities:
- Support for the Server, Data Center, and Cloud editions of Confluence.
- The TOC is precisely preserved when importing from Confluence to ClickHelp.
- Images used in your Confluence pages are downloaded from Confluence and placed in your ClickHelp Storage automatically. In addition, all image links in your migrated Confluence pages are automatically updated.
- Support for a number of Confluence macros converted to relevant ClickHelp entities automatically with all their parameters preserved as much as possible — conditional blocks, snippets, See Also lists, info/warning boxes, etc.
- Support for archived pages import.
- Support for blog posts import.
- Support for the Scroll Versions Confluence plugin, including the capability to select a specific version to import, automatic conversion of page settings to ClickHelp's TOC conditional publishing properties, automatic creation of output tags in ClickHelp, etc.
When importing HTML files to ClickHelp, the <body> tag in the imported files is no longer a requirement.
The Import Project wizard now contains explicit import modes for the following tools:
- Atlassian Confluence
- Microsoft Word
- Google Docs
- Adobe RoboHelp
- MadCap Flare
- Help+Manual
- Paligo
- Document360
- Zendesk

Reader Feedback

GraphComment integration implemented. You can now use GraphComment (a free service) to gather reader comments on help topics.
It is now possible for readers to leave detailed text feedback when they downvote a topic. They can also optionally leave their email for you to follow up on their feedback. The feedback is sent in a specific format to the email address you specify.

Branding

You can now control whether publication links on the portal Home page are filtered by reader UI language.
New Project Not Found page: the page now contains the top menu and application footer, if configured. Its default content styles have been updated.
Special CSS classes are now added to the Topic Not Found and Project Not Found pages: OpenProject_page, OpenProject_page_404, Articles_page_404. You can use the new classes to add page-specific CSS rules to your Branding.css file.
It is now possible to edit CSS styles for Topic Not Found and Project Not Found pages.

Topic Editor

The Print button is now available for authors.
When you navigate to a broken link, the previous project name remains in the UI.
You can now Remove Format via the Ctrl+\ shortcut.
Improved Index Keywords editor UX.

User Management

The Author user role has been renamed to Writer to avoid confusion between the Author role and the Author user type.

Settings

Improved Variables editor UX.
Improved Output Tags editor UX.

Projects page

More stats at your fingertips: summary popups added to projects and publications to display basic information.
Wizard UX improved to be more straightforward and have no “dead ends” — for example, a button to open a newly created project or publication was added at the last step of the wizard.
The Create Project and Import Project buttons are displayed as disabled if the current user has no permission to create projects (were hidden previously).

Translator Dashboard

Icons were added to make it easier to differentiate between translation documents of different types — e.g., topic and TOC folder translations.

Security

Server headers revealing server and application platform versions were removed to improve protection from targeted exploits.

REST API

It is now possible to obtain info on anonymous users' topic views and search queries via the ClickHelp API.
It is now possible to assign multiple user roles to Power Readers via the API.

Other

My Subscription page was updated to reflect the current module-based pricing model of ClickHelp.
Updated the default design for several system pages: Forgot Password, Project Not Found, etc.
Support for all versions of IE11 in ClickHelp is officially discontinued. All other versions are not supported as well.

Bug Fixes

Translation Management

The "Unknown error when adding permission to user" error no longer occurs in some situations when creating a translation project.
See Also elements are now rendered correctly in translation projects.
Cross-publication links are now rendered correctly in translation project publications.
Invalid chars in topic ID translations no longer cause Translation Editor issues.
A previous image translation is no longer displayed as the next image translation in the editor.
A localized image is now displayed correctly if the base language image has whitespaces in its file path.
Image duplicates with escaped spaces in their file names are no longer created when dealing with base language images having spaces in their file names.
Image preview is now updated correctly after picking an image translation from Storage.
The "Object reference not set to an instance of an object" error no longer occurs when trying to change the status of a translation project topic from Needs Translation to In Translation.
Special chars in the TOC folder and topic titles translation are no longer displayed as escaped in translation projects.
Translation topic statuses are now updated correctly when base language topic statuses are changed.
Clicking Cancel in a translation unit's in-place editor no longer removes HTML tag placeholders from the unit.
After the base language topic is changed and the new version is merged with an existing translation, the translation of segments with similar text is no longer duplicated.
The reader UI default language configured in project settings is now used as the default language for the Home page when opened by authors.

Topic Editor

Fixed topic content being cleared when clicking the Edit button too early with the editor still open.
Folder deletion via the context menu in the Insert Image dialog no longer causes the dialog to hang after deleting the folder.
Changes made to Quick Parts are now successfully saved if switching to the HTML mode in the topic editor.
Topics are no longer loaded without TOC if the topic URL syntax is invalid (e.g., the query part goes after the fragment part).
Image size is now handled correctly for images placed in table cells.
Dynamic topic translation with the Google Translate widget now works correctly in publications.
Link Viewer no longer returns reports links to snippets as broken.
It is now possible to delete topics from publications.
A confirmation dialog is now displayed when trying to close a browser having a locked topic open for editing.
Topic properties are now enabled for editing in base language publications.
Duplicated variable names are no longer displayed in the dropdown when having language versions of projects in the portal.
The CSS class applied to the See Also block is now applied to the caption as well.
A page saying the project does not contain any topics is no longer displaying when trying to open a project whose first TOC branch consists of folders and does not have any child topics.
When an image is pasted to a topic, its name now contains the topic ID the image was pasted to (named after the ID of the first topic opened during an editing session previously).

Branding

Fixed an issue with the Home Page template was not updated correctly after changing the template and publishing its translated version.
Fixed main menu header height for mobile view for the Clear Sky and Mountain Mist reader UI templates.
Publication icons are now rendered correctly on the Home Page.

Publishing

In some situations, the "Unable to cast object of type..." error no longer occurs when trying to publish a translation project.
Images located in another project's folder and used in a snippet or topic master page are now copied to the resulting publication folder when publishing.
The "Invalid status specified for the... topic" error no longer occurs in some scenarios when publishing a translation project.
When publishing a translation project, the base language image is no longer published instead of a localized image.
The “Failed to find a location for a topic in the target TOC” error no longer occurs when trying to publish specific topics in the Partial Update mode in some scenarios.
Breadcrumbs with complex separator markup are now rendered correctly in publications.

Import

File paths longer than 259 chars no longer cause the entire import operation to fail when importing HTML files from a .zip archive.
The "Bookmark with the same name already exists" error no longer occurs when importing Word files with duplicate bookmark names.
The "Import styles to" option is no longer available if the "Generate CSS classes" option is disabled.

Export

The "A transport-level error has occurred when sending this request to the server" error no longer occurs when exporting big projects to Web Help.
Styles and scripts referenced in headers/footers and not mentioned in project settings are now exported to Web Help.
Google Analytics integration configured in project settings now works correctly for Web Help.

Full-Text Search

The "filter by" box is no longer empty if searching from the Home page, and no publications are available for the Home page language.

Report Center

The legend position is now correctly updated when you change it via chart settings.
Fixed an issue with the report date range being evaluated incorrectly in some situations when the user's time zone is UTC+3.
Report data for "Last 7 days" and the same period selected as a custom range in the Search Queries report no longer varies.
In some situations, the Search Queries report no longer misses the last point on the line chart.
Projects and publications are now sorted alphabetically.
It is no longer possible to open project-specific reports for publications and vice versa.

Projects page

Projects and publications are now sorted alphabetically.
The Rename option in the More context menu for projects now opens the Project Settings page.
The "project-" prefix is no longer added to copied publication IDs by default in the Copy Project wizard.

Context Help

Context Help popup position is now adjusted correctly when it is close to the right border of the browser window.

User Management

Resolved an error that sometimes occurred when trying to restore a password for a non-existing user via the Forgot Password page.
It is now possible to configure Restricted publication permissions for Reviewer roles.

Settings

Portal base language change no longer causes errors in certain scenarios.
Menu items without their own links no longer open as new empty browser tabs when being clicked if they had the "Open in new window" setting enabled before having their links removed in Reader Menu settings.
Project or publication name change is now successfully saved when changing just the letter case.
The first click made on the Publish button for the Home Page editor is no longer ignored if changes were not saved first.

Global Find/Replace

Global Find/Replace logs are now correctly rendered when replacing complex regular expressions containing HTML markup.

Release Notes: November 2022 — Wave Release Notes: June 2021 — Rainbow