Manula Changelog: What's New in the Manula software (Page 4)

Through Manula’s Custom CSS feature, basically everything could be customized. And most Manula users are using Custom CSS to change the styling of their manual.

However, by far the most common thing our users are using Custom CSS for are:

• to customize font styles, sizes and colors, for both body content and headers
• to customize the page width (limited to 1024 px by default)

So to make it easier for everyone, it is now possible to do these customizations from the Customization tab of the Manual Settings screen:

Previously, none of the Custom CSS styling you implemented was visible in the Preview tab within the Manual admin system. To see the effect of Custom CSS, you have to View your manual Live.

Not anymore! Your Preview tab now shows your topic with your Custom CSS applied. This should make it easier to make and preview your topic changes!

Enjoy!

Last week, we received a great suggestion from one of our clients.
She requested the ability for a manual language to be there but still still hidden/unlisted. This would enable them to add a Language to their manual and work on it, but NOT have the new Language appear in the Language Selector of their live manual yet.

That made enormous sense. In fact, why did we not add this years ago?
So we figured, let’s implement this immediately. And here it is today!

Thanks for the suggestion, Fiona!

Under Account Settings, 2 new settings have been introduced, to control the way dates and times are shown.

Date Format

Available options:

• 31 Dec 2020
• December 31, 2020
• Dec 31, 2020
• 31/12/2020
• 31/12/20
• 12/31/2020
• 12/31/20
• 2020-12-31

Time Format

• 15:15
• 3:15 PM

These settings affect the display of

• the Created and Modified timestamps at the bottom of the topic editor.
• the Last Modified timestamps in the Revision Manager
• the Last Modified timestamps at the bottom of topics in the live manuals.
• the Last Update timestamp in the Generate PDF screen and in the PDF itself.
• the Created timestamps in the Image, Video and Document Managers.

Last week, we expanded the Backup feature with the ability to backup only selected manuals. However, some users missed the easy one-click Backup button to backup all manuals, without having to checkbox all manuals first.

No problem at all! We have now re-introduced a Backup Full Account button and have also expanded this full backup with all account level customization images and CSS files.

By opening a topic with ?noNav=1 added to the topic URL, you can open a topic without the Table of Content or the top bar showing. Giving you only the topic content, no navigation whatsoever.
Many Manula users are using this to show content sensitive help in a browser frame within their application.

However, there was one “little” annoyance with this trick. Once the user clicked a link to another topic, the noNav state was lost and the next topic *would* show the top bar and ToC.

So, we fixed that now. As soon as a topic is opened with the ?noNav=1 parameter, that noNav state will be remembered in a local browser cookie, so that the user stays in this state until he/she closes the browser.
(the noNav cookies is a session cookie).

We hope that this make the noNav param even more useful.

We implemented two important changes to the Backup / Restore today.

Make backups of selected manuals only

Previously, the Backup feature always created a backup of all manuals in your entire account. This is fine if you are just making full backups for safety purposes.
But in some cases, you may want to just Backup specific manuals, e.g. if you want to transfer some manuals to a different Manula account, or if you prefer to make regular quick backups of only the manual(s) that are you currently working on.

So with today’s update, we made that possible. Just checkbox the manuals you want to make a backup of and hit the Backup button on the bottom right. The backup file will only contain the manuals you selected and only the images that are used in those manuals.

Restore feature now fully restores images

At the same time, we have improved the Restore feature to fully support the restoring of only the images of the selected manuals. This way you can efficiently move manuals to a different account.

A while ago, we received an interesting feature request from one of our loyal clients Sharon. For manual versions, she suggested a “Test Mode” option, a visibility selection halfway between Published = YES and Published = NO.

In Test Mode, the version of the manual would be completely public and live, BUT hidden from the version dropdown in the top bar of live manual. This way, a new version of a manual can be previewed by people in your company (by sending them a direct link to the new version), without your users finding it. And without your online manual “defaulting” to showing that latest version.

We figured this was an excellent idea and we have implemented this now.
To stick with Youtube terminology, we called the new status “Published, but Unlisted”.

You can find and select in your Version Manager screen now:

One of the common questions we get at support is:
“How do I duplicate a manual?”

Our answer to this has always been:

– create a new manual and open it in the editor
– click the little arrow on the right of the Add Topic button and choose Copy Topics
– choose the manual you want to copy from, then select all topics using the “Toggle All” button top right.
– then click Copy Selected Topics at the bottom.

A bit of a workaround, but hey, it worked.

However, as of today, our answer will change to:

Just use the Duplicate Manual button on your admin home page:

🙂

Enjoy!

Some Manula users are making serious use of the powerful Variables system. And therefore have huge lists of variable in their Variables screen. Which can make find the variable you need quite annoying.

So today, we introduced a search box, on all 3 tabs of the Variable. Just type in the search box and it will instantly filter down the list, as you type.