Manula Changelog: What's New in the Manula software (Page 14)

Some small performance improvements for the live manuals have been implemented today. The topic pages now have the correct “Last Modified” headers and now respond to “If-Modified-Since” requests, resulting in proper caching behaviour in your browser.
We’re still optimizing the system, so more news on this later.

Now live in your Manual Editor, the new Integrity Checker tool.
This tool automatically checks all topics of your manuals for:

• Broken topic links: links to topics that do not exist (anymore).
• Missing images: references to images that do not exist in the Image Library (anymore).
• Undefined variables: inserted variable that are either not defined or do not have a value.

You can find the Integrity Checker on the Overview page of your Manual Editor, under the “Integrity Checker” tab:

Last week, we gave the home page of your Manula admin a complete make-over.
Today we implemented several performance updates to make this page load faster.

For accounts with lots of manuals, the loading of the views & ratings charts had become quite slow, even to the point of locking up the page for a few seconds. Not anymore!

Some of our clients are using Manula to manage a lot of manuals. And frankly, for those users the home of the Manula admin system was becoming a bit messy. So this week we redesigned that admin home page, plus the live home page of your manuals:

• The Admin Home page now uses a two-column layout, with fixed height panels for each manual.
• The manual panels can now be re-ordered by grabbing the drag-area and dragging the panel to a different spot. This order is then also used on the home page of your live manuals.
• The Search Term “clouds” are now limited in the numbers of terms displayed and have been tweaked to better show the most popular search terms.
• Each manual panel now show the number of topics on the bottom right.
• The Unmoderated Comments are now listed bottom right in the panels.
• The Live Home page also uses a two-column layout now.

Here’s some screen shots for one the largest Manula accounts:

Two small optimizations to the live manuals today:

• When you select a topic in the Table of Contents, it is always automatically “expanded” to show its’ subtopics.
• The clickable (tappable) area of the expand/collapse icons (chevrons) is now slightly larger, making them easier to touch on mobile touch screen devices.

Thanks to Mark from Pyware, for suggestion this tweak!

To improve the speed of your live manual pages, we have implemented a small but effective tweak to our server. All HTML documents, CSS style sheets, and Javascript files are now served in compressed/deflated form (to supported browsers only, but most modern browsers support this).

The difference in page loading speed should be considerable, especially on slower connections.

Just fixed a bug with the integration system that lets you show a Manula manual on your own domain. The bug only happened when showing a manual on a HTTPS url on your own domain and caused all internal topic links to open in a new window (target = “_blank”).

Fixed now, thanks to the guys from AgileBits!

Implemented today: a new look for the Search Results.
Resulting in a more Google-like presentation, with a large topic title, a green link showing the location of the topic in your manual’s structure and a small piece of text showing the first few lines from the topic.

Small fix: the color of the Search button on the Search Results page followed the customized color of the bar. Nice in some cases, but plain wrong when using light colors (or even white) for the top bar.
The Search button is fixed to blue now, just like other buttons in the live manuals.

The Customize options on the Account Settings page lets you optional link the Company Name or Logo to your website, as opposed the manual “hub” page on Manula.com. Previously, this always linked to the Company Website set up in Account Settings.

As of today, you can set up a separate website link for each manual, so that you can have each manual link to a product specific page.