Manula Changelog: What's New in the Manula software (Page 5)

Through the years, some of our users have created huge manuals, with thousands of topics. For those users, the Link to Topic screen was becoming a nightmare, that is, having to select a topic from a simple dropdown box with thousands of entries. No quick way to find a topic either.

So we fixed that problem!

Today we introduced a completely new Link Topic screen. It lets you select the topic to link to from a big list showing your manual’s Table of Content (ToC). Just click the topic you want, then click Insert at the bottom.

But that’s not all. At the same time we added a new Search box at the, that filters the ToC list “as-you-type”. This will make it super-quick to find your topic.

Enjoy, but more importantly: Stay Safe!

Manula’s admin page lets you group your manuals into “Manual Groups”. Your manual hub page then shows these groups, with all groups showing as “closed” by default.

For Manula with a LOT of images in their Image Manager, opening that screen was getting quite slow. So we have just updated the Image Manager to have it “lazy load” the images as you scroll through.

This makes the opening and using of the Image Manager a lot snappier.

All images in your Manula manuals are delivered through a separate image delivery server, that also resizes images “on demand”.

With more or more clients using Manula, this server was getting busier and busier. So to ensure speed and stability of your manuals and their images, we have just upgraded this image delivery server.

A quick addition, based on a request from one of our users (thanks Charles!):

A new system variable called {TOPIC-TITLE} is now available, holding the title of the current topic.

Super useful if you want to include the title of your topic somewhere in your topic’s content, without duplicating the actual title text.

It is now possible to let your manual readers search across all your manuals in one go. To allow this, we have introduced a new search box on your manual hub page:

When searching from there, the search results will present relevant topics from all your manuals:

A small change to the search system today, to make search results more focused, less “fuzzy”:

If you enter multiple words in the search box, the results will now only show topics that contain ALL words. (Previously, it showed topics that contained ANY of the words.)

Enjoy!

It is now possible to create nice lists with entries that can be expanded to show more content.

Since the Textile mark-down language does not provide for something like this, it requires some HTML tags:

List item 1

item 1 content

List item 2

Item 2 content

List item 3

Item 3 content

The content blocks can contain any content you like, like images, bullets, tables, warning boxes, etc…

More details and some demo expandable lists can be found in our manual here.

Added today, thanks to Rossen Varbanov, the user interface texts for the live manuals are now also available in Bulgarian.

(user interface texts automatically switch over with the language setting of your manual)

For some types of manuals, it is important to list the topic’s last modified date under each topic. For instance, one Manula user requested this feature for their ISO27001 compliance.

With today’s changes, we have give you two ways to do this:

• We have introduced a new System Variable called {TOPIC-LAST-MODIFIED}. You can use that to manually include the date into your topics, only where needed.
• We have introduced a new setting in the Manual Settings screen, under Customization, called “Include last modified date below each topic“. This will automatically include the date under each topic, in both the live manual and generated PDF, nicely right aligned, in light grey italics.