Release Notes: June 2013

In this release of our documentation tool, we are adding support for conditional content in the article body. With this feature, you can use a single source to produce multiple outputs. With the new Publish Configurations functionality, you can select which articles to include to a publication, override project variables values, and vary CSS styles. With these possibilities, you can fine-tune the final output as needed, and produce several online manuals from the same source.

• New Features
  • Projects & Publications
  • Conditional Content
  • WYSIWYG HTML Editor
  • Other Improvements
• Fixed Bugs

New Features  

Projects & Publications  

• Publish Configurations.  Now, you can create a publish configuration before publishing your project - this helps you store and re-use publishing settings for a project.
• Publish Configurations editor.  Get things prepared before you publish: the Publish Configurations of the current project can be edited via Publish Configurations Editor available via "Project | Settings... | Configurations | Publish Configurations" in the main menu.
• Conditional table of contents.  New publishing setting: now, you can control what articles will be published in a flexible way: publish all, publish selected articles only, publish all articles except for selected.
• Conditional styles & scripts.  New publishing setting: now, you can control what style and script files will be applied to a publication.
• Override Project Variables for a Publication.  New publishing setting: specify new values for global and project variables. These values will be used in the publication instead of the original values defined for a project, or globally.
• No Default Publication anymore.  The Default Publication concept has been terminated in order to simplify the publication ideology. From now on, each article URL identifies a single article uniquely. URLs which only contain an article ID without a project ID are no longer considered to be valid article URLs.
• Multi-version online documentation.  Now, you can work on as many versions of the same documentation project as you need. For example, you can author documentation for several versions of your product simultaneously. When the documentation gets published, your end users can switch between publications: MyProduct 1.0, MyProduct 1.1, MyProduct 2.0, etc.

Conditional Content  

• Conditional Content blocks.  With this feature, you can precisely control what content will be included into a publication. Two types of blocks implemented: Include Blocks and Exclude Blocks. For example, if you have multiple editions of your product (Standard, Pro, Enterprise) and some part of a help topic is relevant only for the Standard edition, you need to create a publish configuration for this edition (for example, the name is "Standard") and specify the configuration's name in the Include Block wrapped around the content:
  <ch:include pubConfigNames="Standard">...</ch:include>
  You can specify multiple publish configuration names in a single Include/Exclude block. For example, if you want some content to be excluded from the Pro and Enterprise editions' documentation, you need to use the following syntax:<ch:exclude pubConfigNames="Pro,Enterprise">...</ch:include>

WYSIWYG HTML Editor  

• Conditional Content and Variables are supported in the WYSIWYG view.  It is still WYSIWYG: even though the new custom tags introduced in this release have no equivalents in HTML, the Design mode does display visual elements for ClickHelp-specific entities. They are: global and project variables, conditional content blocks. Variables are represented as boxes having different colors depending on their type. If you hover over such box, you will see the variable's name, type and current value in a tooltip. If a variable with the given name does not exist, the box will become red, so you can easily notice the error. Conditional content blocks are represented via similar boxes located inside a container with dashed border denoting the limits of the block. Include and Exclude blocks have different colors. If an invalid publish configuration name is specified for a conditional content block, the box will become red.
• Conditional content is fully resolved in the Preview mode.  Check the final content version with just one click: the Preview panel now displays the resulting HTML you will get when the article is published, with all the variables and conditional blocks resolved.
• Auto-completion for conditional blocks and variable tags.  In the source editor, the auto-completion window now supports the conditional blocks and varibales. It also displays a short reference for those tags for your convenience.
• Automatic saving on switching the tabs.  To make sure your content is even more safe, switching the tabs in the article editor (Design / Source / Preview) triggers the changes saving automatically.

Other Improvements  

• New sample articles in all Project Templates.  To demonstrate the new Conditional Content and Variables functionality, we have added two new articles to all Project Temlates: "Variables" and "Conditional Content" - they demonstrate how to use the corresponding new functions of ClickHelp.
• Project settings in a separate page.  They are not in popup window anymore, and they have a new improved look&feel!
• Overall performance improvements.  Performance is important, and we are working to provide best possible user experience in our online documentation tool.
• Non-TOC Label  The Non-TOC tree now has a small label in the top right corner, with a tooltip containins a short reference on what the Non-TOC tree is.
• Lots of other nice improvements for technical writers!

Fixed Bugs  

Layout

• Fixed minor padding issues for combo boxes in Chrome.
• Fixed tooltip of the Remove button in the recent documents list on the Projects page.
• Fixed minor padding issues for the "Chose Project Template" step of the Create Project wizard in Chrome.
• Fixed a typo in a scripts deletion option name on the second step of the Delete Project wizard.
• Fixed a typo on the first step of the Create Project wizard (invalid project template name removed from wizard text).
• Fixed problem with the user profile page layout for long login names (the layout got corrupted for long names before).
• Fixed minor padding issues for the Recent Documents panel on the Projects page.

TOC Editor

• In-place editor for TOC nodes' captions no longer closes unexpectedly.
• The "Remove to Non-TOC" context menu item in the TOC tree no longer causes all nodes to be selected before moving the needed node.
• When a selected TOC node is expanded for the first time, its children are now sleected automatically.
• It is now possible to select an article by click in the TOC/Non-TOC tree when the article is already focused. You no longer have to change focus for that. So, no selection problem will occur if there's only a single article in the TOC/Non-TOC tree.

Projects

• When a project is copied/published, custom icons associated with TOC nodes are now taken from the copy/publication's folder if the images were copied.
• Lists of project styles/scripts on the right panel of the Projects page now display correct data when the page is loaded for the first time (file names were loaded only after panel refresh previously).
• Subitems of the "Project" main menu item are now disabled if there are no projects in the database or no project is currently selected.

Articles Editor

• When the Insert Link or Insert Image dialog is invoked in the Articles Editor, the "The resouce class for this page was not found" error no longer occurs.

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