For the past year, we've been working on a new update. Actually, we didn't have a specific date in mind or anything like that, we've just been gathering feedback from our users, looking closely at the latest trends and what people in general want, and working. Working hard to make our tool better, faster and more accessible to a larger audience. Over the past year, we made a tremendous amount of work, perfecting ClickHelp.
Truth be told, I don't even know where to start. When I contacted our programmers and asked for something that can help me in writing this sneak peek, they sent me a changelog file with hundreds of lines of new features/improvements/fixes/etc.
*takes a deep breath* okay… Without further ado, let's take a quick look at the biggest features of ClickHelp's March Release.
In the upcoming release, we significantly improved navigation both for technical writers/reviewers and readers.
Index Keywords (Taxonomies) are like tags, which you assign to topics. Now if your topic doesn't feature a single notion of "security", but you still want it to be searchable by that word — index keywords to the rescue! Just assign a keyword to a topic and rejoice: now your users will find your "Setting up a two-factor authentication" article by searching "account security".
Full-Text Search is getting an overhaul and will perform even better, getting you even more relevant results. And, it supports wildcards now as well as search operators (AND/OR and the like).
Overall, navigation is becoming more visual — feel free to include mini-ToCs (which now know how to auto-update themselves), breadcrumbs or see also elements into your topics. Do this on a topic-by-topic basis or edit Topic Master Page to apply changes to all of your topics.
Review is an essential part of documentation writing, right? Right. So we improved this side of ClickHelp as well.
In-text review comments are being overhauled. Now they work pretty much like in Google Docs, so the workflow will feel familiar and easy to get used to.
To-Do list. Yes, a to-do list. This feature may seem small, but it's very important. Instead of using 3rd party apps or sticky notes you can now create to-do items right in the ClickHelp. They are per-topic items, so they're super-useful for laying out the topic structure or leaving notes for a specific article.
Now you'll be able to gather even more info and get an insight into your documentation more easily and quickly.
Report Center has been slightly redesigned and polished to give you even more info at glance. Some cool stuff was added as well, like Reader Count Report — so now you know how often people read your documentation.