We are pleased to announce the release of improvements to Guides. To organise information more effectively and improve the stability of Guides, we’ve upgraded the information structure so Guides can be arranged with clear hierarchy in mind and be easily navigable by end users. 

Previously, Guides were structured by: 

• Topic Sections 

• Topics 

From now on, Guides will be structured by:

• Volumes

• Chapters

• Pages

The use of Volumes will be enabled by default in the settings of a newly created Guide. However, you’ll still be able to disable this if necessary by unticking the “Use Volumes” option within the Guide settings:

What will happen to existing Guides? 

When an existing Guide has been upgraded, there are three possible scenarios:

Scenario 1:

If a guide previously had Topic Sections with nested Topic Sections, the Topic Sections and Nested Topic Sections will simply be converted to Volumes and Chapters, respectively. 

Scenario 2:

If a guide previously had only Topic Sections, these Topic Sections will be converted to Chapters. 

Scenario 3:

If a guide previously had both Topic Sections and Topic Sections with nested Topic Sections at the first node level, then an extra Volume will be created for the stand-alone Topic Sections in the Guide (which are now Chapters within the extra Volume). 

This scenario may require your attention to make some changes as a result of the upgrade. For example, the extra Volume created may need to be renamed.

Further recent improvements to Guides 

As part of the Guides beta, we’re continuously improving the experience of using Guides with smaller tweaks and fixes to make them more stable. Here’s a summary of some of the recent improvements that we’ve made to Guides. 

To simplify the navigation between and the searching within Guides, we’ve introduced a landing page where all Guides can be viewed and filtered by title. 

Additionally, there is a landing page for individual Guides to preview the information within.

The search functionality has also been significantly improved, and users will now be able to search the entire Guide.  

Links have been introduced at the end of Guide Pages to allow end users to quickly navigate between similar pages of interest.

With the addition of distinct URL pages for each page, users can go directly to the right page instead of starting at the top and scrolling endlessly through a Guide.  Users will also be able to freely explore the table of contents within a guide all whilst reading the current guide page which will remain in its place. 

If you currently have several Guides, users will now be able to quickly access them through the new drop-down menu. 

Finally, to increase the functionality of and user interaction with the Guides, comments can now be added to Guide pages in a similar fashion to Knowledgebase and News Articles.

In other news, a number of other bug fixes have been made so please make sure to view the Release Notes for further information!