Manula Changelog: What's New in the Manula software (Page 11)

Two small tweaks to the Image Manager today, fixing three user interface annoyances:

1. After adding an image, it is now automatically selected, for easy instant inserting to your topic.
   (previously, one had to find the newly added image in the list first)

2. The Image Manager now remembers the Sort Order you select.
   (previously, it was reset to Name order each time you opened the screen)

3. When clicking a folder on the left, it is automatically expanded to show sub-folders, if any.
   (previously, it was necessary to click the tiny folder icon to make it expand)

Enjoy!

This one is for the SEO nerds among us. Especially interesting if you’re running your Manula manuals on your own domain. As of today, all live manual topics now automatically include meta keywords and a meta description in their head tags.

The meta keywords are set to your topic’s keywords (at the bottom left of your topic editor).
The meta description is set to the first 160 characters of your topic’s content.

All customization settings for logo’s, icons and PDF cover images now use your trusted Image Manager to pick an image.

This makes it easier to share the same image between multiple customization settings and manual topics.

In the Manual Settings screen, under the Visibility Settings, there is now a new setting “Block search engine indexing”.

When checked, all pages of your live manual will have the following extra meta tag:

This will prevent most search engine spiders from indexing the page.

When logging in to the Manula admin, you have the option to “Keep me logged in”.
However, it appeared that when using this option, one could run into random “log outs” while using the Manula editor.

This has now been fixed. This setting now actually keeps you logged in 🙂

The default link text for the link to your Support page is “Don’t hesitate to contact us here.”, displayed next to the feedback options at the bottom of each topic.

It is now possible to customize this link text, e.g. if you prefer to link to a Support Forum instead (in which case “contact us” wouldn’t really apply) or just to tweak the text to your own liking.

The new setting can be found in Feedback section of the Manual Settings screen:

Here’s the result of the above alternative link text in a live manual:

Some users like to generate PDF versions of their manuals, e.g. for internal use, but do not want to publish the download on their live manuals.

So the Manula admin now lets you remove the generated PDF:

In the Video Manager, you can now (optionally) set the Start and End time for YouTube videos. The embedded videos, when played, will then play only the video section between the selected Start time and end time.

For Wistia videos, it is only possible to set a Start time, since Wistia doesn’t support End times for embedded videos.

Sadly, Start/End times are not supported when embedding Vimeo videos.

Manula already had support for embedding videos into your topics, using either videos hosted on YouTube or Vimeo.

Today we added Wistia to this list, a video hosting platform that is targeted at business videos, so a great fit for Manula.
The management and inserting of Wistia works exactly the same as YouTube and Vimeo, just grab the video ID from your Wistia video URL and add it to our Video Manager:

As promised earlier, we have now taken the next step in improving our manual content delivery.
As of today, all manual images are delivered through Manula’s upcoming sister product:

SizR.io, a high performance image resizing and delivery system.

SizR.io is now used for images included in manual topics, side bar images and top bar images, resulting in faster loading of your live manuals. The thumbnails versions of images in your Image Managers are served through SizR.io too, making the Image Manager load faster too.

Also new today:
PDF files are now delivered through a world-wide content delivery network, resulting in faster downloads.