Previous/Next navigation buttons in each article page?
Hi, I’m using Scroll Viewport for Cloud. I have a lot of pages in the tree, and many of the pages are long. I would like to add a “next” button to the bottom of each page so the user can just click next to continue reading. Currently they have to scroll up to the tree in the left nav which isn’t always on the same screen, and it’s slow and annoying.
What’s the best way to create the next button, like this example?
https://www.k15t.com/rock-the-docs/documentation-guide/content-reuse/organize-your-reusable-content
I know I can manually create links, but that is no good since I’d have to change them every time pages are moved or added. I think I might be able to use a macro for child pages, but I don’t know if that will work to get to the next parent section after the last child. Also that would require manually adding to every page. I saw another post on this topic with some example JS/CSS but I couldn’t get that to work. And I know there are confluence plugins for this, but those don’t render to the web via Scroll Viewport.
So, any suggestions? Surely I’m not the only one in this situation?
Thanks!
Brian
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Official comment
Hi sara oconnell! I'm glad that you're bringing up the topic again. We will actually be looking into this again soon, this time as part of the current theme.
If you would like to help us through some design questions we have, please reach out via help@k15t.com!
Comment actions -
Hi Brian,
The help center theme doesn't come with a next/previous navigation as it was designed for rather free exploration of content within a give structure/hierarchy.
The end-goal is to help the reader find the information they're looking for. The page tree structure and search are the key elements to facilitate that navigation. Within such a context, typically, you wouldn't want to direct users in a sequential way. Instead, you prefer directing to similar content, like related articles, which you can easily do with the 'content by label' macro.
The site you link to (Rock the Docs) is not a help center, instead, it was designed for more directed exploration of content in way that progressively discloses different concepts in increasing complexity of concepts.
Having said that, we are working on new themes that are closer to the example you share. If you like to discuss your use case, feel free to email us at help@k15t.com. Perhaps a different theme can better address your use case.
For now, it might help if we just have a look at the page tree problem you describe. The page tree should always be scrolled to the active page, so your users don't have to scroll up or down to the tree all the time. Perhaps you could share more details (screen recording, link to site etc) via help@k15t.com so we can have a closer look at your issue and improve from there.
Cheers,
Laura
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Ah ok, this is helpful, thanks.
Well, it’s not helpful in my situation, but at least I know how the product works now. :)
In my case, in addition to a “knowledge base” type content, we are essentially publishing our product documentation online. Think of this like a book, sort of, with the tree view on the left, but most readers will click through and do “next, next, next” to read through it. I know I can manually create links, but then I will also have to wrap those in tags for the PDF export so that every section of the PDF doesn’t include the text and links to the next page. (I think I can wrap individual content sections to not show in the PDF?) It’s just a lot of manual work and manual link management, which is why I was looking at Scroll Viewport with Confluence in the first place. (I have a lot of experience with documentation in github which is published online via ReadTheDocs.)
I’ll reach out via email and will hope that the new themes will help this use case.
The related articles idea is ok, but again that’s just lots of manual tag management.
Side question: If you allow for multiple themes, I hope it’s possible to apply different themes to different content sources (Confluence spaces), since our plan is to pull together content from 6 different spaces, but 3 of them are more like directed content / product manuals, and 3 of them will be more free form (reference, tutorials, etc.)
Another side question: Would Scroll Documents help at all in our case? So far I haven’t tried it, since I am the only person creating content, so we don’t need all the overhead of approval workflows, and we don’t have multiple product versions to deal with, but if Scroll Documents provides any type of additional flexibility then that would be something I’d consider.
Thanks again for your time and responses. This product is pretty good, I just wish we could customize the cloud version a bit more.
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Thanks! Your analogy of a book helps me understand what you're looking for. It also brings out the point I made in the previous post about the help center theme not being really designed for this type of exploration of content. Therefore, I think it would be extremely valuable to explore together how our new themes might address your use case better!
Thanks also for the note about different themes being applicable to different content sources.
Scroll Documents wouldn't really help with any of the above at the moment. Scroll Documents gives you more content management options, but currently these are mainly in the following areas: versioning, re-using and conditionalizing content. And coming soon: managing translations of content. However, we're more than happy to demo the app to you if you'd like to explore how the app could improve your process! And from there perhaps we even find that there's a content management functionality we should add to the app.
Laura
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This is a great question and directly related to my workplace's use of Scroll Viewport. We are moving our user manuals into confluence and publishing them with scroll viewport. We wanted to direct users through concepts in a linear fashion, and we actually did the thing you mentioned Brian. We manually added previous and next page links to the bottom of each page. In almost no time, those links have gone bad (due to moving information around) and all need to be manually updated.
I would be very much interested in a different theme that better serves the purpose of publishing a traditional user's manual. Of course, we want users to be able to easily search for the information they want, but we also want them to have the option of experiencing the information in a more linear fashion, introducing terms and concepts for a new user.
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