Focus On: Publishing

Roger Gelwicks once again leads us through a comprehensive journey into the Paligo CCMS platform, this time focusing on publishing. Discover how to best utilize Paligo’s features for content publishing and the amazing impacts it can have.

Roger Gelwicks: One thing that’s important to note with publishing is that the different output formats in Paligo are organized into what are called layouts. There’s lots of different layout options, and the ones you’ll choose depend on what you’re trying to accomplish. You can publish as a PDF; that’s a very basic one. You can also publish as a web-based format, either clean XHTML or a responsive ‌HTML5 Help Center design. That’s a very popular option.

You can also publish as an eLearning format. So if you have SCORM output, and you want to reuse your content from your documentation within your instructional design and e-learning material, you can output as a SCORM file as well. There’s also publishing formats such as publishing to Zendesk or publishing to Salesforce Knowledge or working with Content Delivery Platform (CDP), like Fluid Topics or Zoomin.

There’s lots of different publishing options, but regardless of the one you pick, you can further customize that option through a layout and the layout is where you determine the individual settings. For example, the layout controls the look and feel. In a PDF, you can adjust how it appears, what the page layout looks like, what fonts and colors are used, and things like that. Regarding HTML5, you can include things like theme options. You can also upload custom CSS or JavaScript to make it look and operate the way you want or do some advanced settings with classes and attributes or complicated things with tables and images. So there’s lots of options for your layout, which makes it likely that there’s a way to do almost whatever you want when it comes to publishing.

Roger: Aside from publishing to a help center application like Zendesk, Salesforce or Fresh Desk, and aside from content delivery platforms, like Fluid Topics or Zoomin, you can also publish some other ways, including through CI/CD where you can publish using GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket. If you have a pipeline workflow that you want to use for publishing your output to a certain location, you can also use something like Netlify. And that’s even aside from options like FTP, so, there are a lot of ways to publish.

Roger: Yes. If you have several different versions of an output, you could use one layout, then base another layout on that one. For example, if you have several sets of PDFs you want to publish, and they look very similar but have only slight changes between the two, you could have a master PDF to base the settings on. Then you can have other PDF layouts that are based on that layout, to further customize the output.

Roger: Very easy. Essentially, all you have to do is just select the language that you want during publishing. A dialogue ‌appears and you can choose the language you want before you click “Publish Document.” Another plus is that you can publish just one language or combine several languages into the same output. For example, if you have PDFs, you could publish the English version and the French version and the German version either as independent PDFs or as one combined document.

Roger: There are so many options to make the output look the way that you want, even if that means you’re doing some custom CSS or JavaScript to get there. So, it’s still really easy to publish using these layouts instead of struggling with the formatting every single time. The whole point of the publishing workflow is to speed up that process where you make those decisions at the layout level. So that way, when it’s time to publish, you don’t have to keep messing with the formatting after the fact. The layouts are there to make the publishing job much faster as opposed to a process that takes a long time. Once you publish, all that’s left is to host the output somewhere.