Needs links that always go to the latest version of a page, on Cloud
I am on Confluence Cloud. I am currently evaluating Scroll Viewport and Scroll Documents to determine if they are the right solution to publishing our customer help documentation. So right now I have a viewport site at (mysitename).scrollhelp.site and the Content Sources are my Scroll Documents.
The biggest problem so far is that I need links that go between Documents, but those links always need to go to the latest version of any given Document. I can't figure out how to do that.
- As an example: I have a Desktop Site (DS) and a Mobile App (MA). I'm thinking I should have separate Documents for each, because development cycles are different for each. My DS is updated every 6 months, while MA is updated monthly. So I might still be working on DS content when MA content is ready to go live.
- Because DS and MA are integrated, I need to be able to link back and forth between the information (if you're on a help page about the DS, I want to be able to include a link to relevant content on the MA - and vice versa).
- I need for the link to always go to the latest version of the MA content. So whenever someone is reading my DS information and clicks on a link that I included, it goes to whatever is the most current version of that MA link, at the time they click it.
THAT is what I cannot figure out how to do. Every way I try to do this, it seems that the link that I insert in the DS document is always "tied" to the Page ID (the ID of the MA page at the time I was writing the DS content). That's a problem because the Page ID changes on every MA version. A month after I publish the DS content, there's a new version of MA content out there, with a new page ID on everything, and the links on the DS content no longer work (they just start going go to my actual Confluence instance, which I absolutely don't want).
Now, as an example of something that works the way I want - here's a link that was posted several years ago (on another Community Question) and it went to what was, at the time, the latest version of the information:
https://help.k15t.com/scroll-versions/latest/publish-a-version-110528291.html
But today, when you click on that link, you actually end up at the following link, which is the latest version of that information NOW:
https://help.k15t.com/scroll-versions/latest/publish-in-confluence-179704878.html
I can't puzzle out how to do this on my own site. Hours of Googling leads me to a lot of information about how to do this on a Server instance, but not Cloud.
This issue of needing to link to our latest version is one of our most important concerns, so I am open to changing my back-end architecture (like changing my organization of Documents and Spaces, or even disabling Scroll Documents and managing my versions a more manual way) to make this work how I need it to work.
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Official comment
Hi Kelly,
I'm Laura from the Scroll Viewport team. First, thanks for your questions and for evaluating Scroll Viewport and Scroll Documents as your documentation publishing solution.
Programmatically directing users to the latest version of documentation on your online help center is unfortunately not (yet) possible with Scroll Viewport - unless you only maintain one version on the live site at a given time.
If you’re only showing the latest version in your help center, then we recommend you add the working version of your Scroll Document to your Viewport site, as explained in our help article Which Document Versions Should I Add to My Site?.
From there, simply Save a version with Scroll Documents before making any changes to your documentation (e.g. for a new release). That way you can keep an internal version history that references older versions of your documentation. Once your version with the outdated content is saved, you can proceed to overwrite the content on the working version with the planned changes. Then it’s simply a matter of clicking Update Site in Scroll Viewport to bring the changes live on your site.
However, if you’d like to still show older versions of your documentation to your customers for them to see and access in the help center, then you would unfortunately be facing the issues that you describe (the latest version of your articles would always receive a new pageID).
Having said that, we do plan to make URLs more stable in the future (especially across versions). As part of those plans we are also considering support for functional URL formats that contain virtual versions such as "latest”. That improvement would give you the flexibility you need to always direct your users to the latest version of your content - even if there are several versions to select from on your site.
I'm very sorry for the current limitations and any inconvenience caused.
On a different note. Since you mention that you keep two separate sets of documentation, one for your Desktop Site and one for your Mobile App: Perhaps you are interested in knowing that we are currently working on a new feature in Scroll Documents (which will then be supported by Viewport as well) that would allow you to manage content variants from one document set while specifying which pages of your document belong to the Mobile App and which to the Desktop App. That is especially helpful if there is lots of overlap between these sets of documentation.
With the variants feature, you would then have the option to deliver these content variants to two separate sites or to the same site, displaying a variants switcher. This switcher would look similar to the current version switcher and allows your users to pick the content variant that is relevant for them.
If you’re interested in the feature, we’d be more than happy to invite you to test out the beta version when it’s ready. Just shoot me an email (lparraga@k15t.com) so I can note down your contact details on our list of beta testers.Let me know if you have further questions on any of this!
Cheers,
Laura
Comment actions -
Hi,
I want to add this.
Why do you want to jump to the latest version when ideally, the customer should see the corresponding matching version of another (MA/DS) and not the latest?
Once you have somehow managed to implement, you will probably end up in trouble of fixing user's context of where he is, where you want him to go, and what was he wanting to go. So I think what is implemented right now is better. I have not seen anyone doing what you are looking for. Or, just do it like Laura suggested. That's the only way out.
Also, from usability perspective - "people/users spend more time on other websites than your website". So doing something so different that they are not used to or have seen might give them a not desirable experience. But by all means, if you are sure - please go ahead. My best wishes.
-Amit
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Laura, I very much appreciate the time you took to answer the question. I appreciate your thoughts on the workflow and the insight into the changes you're working on/planning to address down the road. I will play around with it according to your suggestions and see if I can make it work for us. I had an inkling that that's kind of how we'd have to organize things to achieve the result I'm looking for, but it is very helpful to get confirmation on that (so I know that I'm not just missing something). The variants feature sounds awesome, I can't wait to see how that works. Thank you for the invite to be a beta tester - I don't think I'm quite ready for that yet (since I'm kind of still figuring out how to put everything together just to get started) but I will definitely keep that in mind.
Amit, I also appreciate your thoughts. I do understand people spend more time on other websites than on mine, so the website should act the way they expect it to. That is actually the issue I'm trying to address - linking them to the content they will expect when they click on a link. I simplified my situation for the sake of the question, but my reality is that I have a dozen software products that are all related (and so their info needs to link back and forth a lot), but they're all updated on totally different schedules. There really aren't "corresponding matching" versions between the different products. It's unfortunately not as simple as "if a user is on MAv8 then I know they'll be on DS v1." When I'm writing my DS v1 information, I have no idea if the eventual reader will be on DS v1 + MA v5 + widget v52, or if they'll be on DS v 1 + MA v8 + widget v65, etc.
So - if I can't know what version my reader will be on, then the safest thing to do is the default to the latest information whenever I'm linking from 1 product's info to another (knowing that most of my users will be on the latest version of any of my products, most of the time).
As I'm typing this out, I'm slowly realizing - maybe the best way to approach this is to create a a dozen different viewport sites, one for each of my products, instead of 1 viewport houses them all. I will have to think more about that.
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