ClickHelp Releases the Gecko Update of its Online Documentation Platform
ClickHelp online documentation tool is happy to introduce its Gecko Release. It brings improvements in many product areas: more flexible author permissions, better tables editing, new reader UI templates, better performance, and more. All that allows making the technical writing workflow simple, quick, effective, and convenient.
TULA, Russia, July 24, 2020 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- Project-based Access for Authors
Multiple teams working in one documentation portal is a common use case for many organizations. It's great to collaborate on different content in a single documentation portal. But sometimes there are several documentation projects and separate teams are working on them without any overlap. In this case, it is handy to be able to set things up so that every team can see only their projects and not those of other teams. It is now possible! You can specify which projects should be available to which authors. Projects that are not available to an author will be hidden from the Dashboard and other project lists. With all extra elements gone, the work environment becomes more comfortable and far less confusing for larger organizations. This new approach allows to better organize multiple departments' collaboration in a single ClickHelp documentation portal, making it more effective and structured.
Besides, using the access restrictions, it's now easier to involve contractors outside of your company to do some of the content work. With the new flexible permission settings, you can provide access only to specific projects these external people are going to be working with without the need to expose all portal content. This will definitely be useful for working with freelancers and contractors.
Faster Topic Switching in the Topic Editor
When you write help topics, you may need to switch between different ones to check something. The ClickHelp editor's behavior was changed to allow you to swiftly move between help topics when editing them. You can quickly jump between topics when you need to - the editor remains in the editing mode, making the process much faster!
Improved Table Operations
We know how important tables are for many help writers. They are a great way to systemize and display big amounts of info, a lot of people are using them, hence our recent table improvements! Resizing is now visual; you can simply pull on a column and get the table to look the way you want. You can use shortcuts to add rows, move across the cells with the keyboard, etc. You can easily insert one table content into another table's cells. These are simple things, but they spare time efficiently.
Quick Parts in Topic Editor
This functionality covers a huge chunk of use cases connected with quick usage of ready elements. Now you can turn any part of your help topic into a Quick Part. Quick Parts allow adding dynamic elements to them like Variables, Snippets, Conditional Blocks, Navigation Elements. This means authors can speed up content creation and preserve the same structure for help topics of the same kind. You can not only add small blocks with Quick Parts, you can even use them to store and instantly access big pieces of content - anything you feel like you will be reusing a lot. This can be a code sample, a text fragment, a table with content, a UI screenshot… anything! That boosts technical writers' productivity and this feature has great potential.
Turn Selection to a Snippet
Sometimes, after you finish a topic, you see that some parts of it can be reused elsewhere. The surefire way to do this is to use the Snippets feature. This functionality allows storing and managing repeated content. And, it got enhanced in ClickHelp Gecko! We believe this can help you save time and effort and will encourage you to use Snippets more for easier content maintenance.
Speeding Up Reviews
A nice improvement of the review process - now, when you select text, a context popup shows up next to the selection prompting you to add a review comment. This can really save a lot of time when you need to add many comments.
More Reader UI Templates
Reader UI templates are great - you can configure them according to your needs. Not all documentation portals have the same layout, just like different types of user manuals require different navigation elements. This is why we are offering 6 ready templates you can apply and configure to meet your requirements. New templates bring more variations of layouts with a TOC. The way your documentation looks can be fine-tuned by the means of straightforward visual settings. Make the reader experience better and more oriented at specific readers' needs with these templates.
There are more improvements in the Gecko release to make your daily technical writing work easier and more efficient - check the full list of changes in ClickHelp July 2020 Release Overview - Gecko:
https://clickhelp.com/clickhelp-technical-writing-blog/clickhelp-july-2020-release-overview-gecko/
SOURCE ClickHelp
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