One of the most peculiar output formats — and the one that ClickHelp is famous for — is the online publication. It is the most feature-rich output of a project among all other output formats. Unlike other formats, online publications are hosted on our servers and available on your portal right after the publishing is finished.
You don't have to think about delivering your publications to your readers — they will see your documentation on your portal Home Page and can access it via direct links. Over time, it will also become available on search engines like Google — unless you disallow this or restrict your publications, i.e., password-protect them.
Reader Interface
Simply put, the content that you write is presented in an entirely different interface when readers open a publication. Although the content styling stays the same, the surroundings are different. The Reader UI has many features that ease navigation and improve the experience for the readers, like the Breadcrumbs, See Also and Related Topics lists, search bar, Feedback Widget, and more.
For different Reader Interface Templates, the width of the content area is generally narrower than what you see in the Topic Editor in the authoring interface. This means that some elements like large images, wide tables, Code Samples, and other elements may look different to readers. To check how your content will look for the readers, you can use the Reader Preview.
Online publication creation
Publishing a ready manual and creating an online version of the project is a matter of a few clicks: Create publication.
| You can publish as many versions of your manual as you want — there is no limit to the number of online publications a single project can have. |
When creating a publication, the system automatically generates a publication ID based on the publication name; you can change the ID at the time of publishing. A publication ID is used as a part of the URL to the published topics. Remember that publication IDs must be unique across the entire portal — they can not match project IDs either.
Publications are made to be as static as possible so that when you make changes to the project, they are not affected. Therefore, the system creates a folder in your portal's File Storage with a name based on a publication ID. All files from the corresponding project's folder, including styles and scripts, are copied there.
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For example, if you start creating a publication named User Guide Version 2.0, the system will automatically generate an ID user-guide-version-2-0. Then, ClickHelp will create a folder with the same name. Thus, the Getting Started topic within this publication will have the following URL: https://docs.hedronlabs.org/articles/#!user-guide-version-2-0/getting-started |
In ClickHelp publications can be:
- Public - available for everyone
- Restricted - available only to selected Power Readers and Contributors after login.
- Private - available only to selected Contributors after login.
Online publication update
After you create a publication, you can update it at any time to keep it up to date with your project. You can fully replace an existing publication with the contents of your project with a couple of clicks. Or you can update only a part of it — a single topic or a set of topics — by utilizing our Partial Update feature. Partial Update allows you to push the changes made in a project to a publication affecting only selected topics, keeping others untouched. This allows for faster delivery of the finished documents — you can push individual topics as soon as they are ready without waiting for the whole project to be done.
To get started with the Partial Update, take a look at these resources:
It is also possible to edit topics in a publication directly. And while it can be great for making a quick fix, if you don't make the same changes in a project, the system might override them with the next publication update.
Online publication protection
You can set up restricted access if you want to make your online manuals available only for registered users. Only the Power Readers — users with an account in your ClickHelp portal who can access publications only — to whom you gave access to a specific publication will be able to open that publication. Read more about creating restricted manuals here: Restricted User Manuals.
Your readers do not need to remember a separate set of credentials unique to the ClickHelp portal. You can easily set up authentication via Single Sign-On providers or token-based authentication.
In addition, you can make a publication Private so that only contributors can access it, which may be helpful for the internal review, for example.
Creating Private and Restricted publications is not the only way to protect your documentation in ClickHelp. Explore other methods for protecting your user manuals.