With version 3.3, Fluid Topics is enabled to store and deliver new types of content and also has new ways to load that content.
Articles leverage Knowledge Base and Forum sources
Fluid Topics now lets you add a new type of editorial content to the Knowledge Hub . It behaves differently and bolsters the user experience. It’s called the Article.
An Article typically comes from:
- A Knowledge Base (a topic, with or without comments)
- A Forum or other collaboration platform (a thread with the initial post and its replies)
- A technical support/ticketing platform (a ticket and its resolution)
- A corporate web site: any plain HTML page
Articles are composed of only a handful of topics or sections. Because they are smaller – as opposed to large instruction manuals for example – and because they only make sense when considered in their entirety, they require a slightly different behavior than other content types. Publications processed as Articles appear as standalone search results and open in the Reader from the beginning. This new behavior has been designed to improve search relevance and give all the context to the user when reading the content. The topics within an Article do not show up as search results on their own.
Open APIs for Programmable Publishing
New Programmable Publishing capabilities in Fluid Topics enable complete customization of your content ingestion, regardless of the data format.
A new Python API allows you to build your own documentation objects from any existing data source, and publish them into Fluid Topics Knowledge Hub.
Beyond the palette of off-the-shelf connectors provided with Fluid Topics, this API makes it easy to create ad-hoc connectors for ingesting any content from legacy or proprietary sources – leveraging the topics and maps paradigm – that will be searched and read in Fluid Topics.
New Ingestion Format: FTML
The FTML (Fluid Topics Modeling Language) connector provides a pivot format for aggregating and tagging any HTML content and making it ready to ingest for Fluid Topics, with appropriate metadata. No development skills are needed: just send ZIP bundles of HTML files into Fluid Topics.
The FTML connector is based on the new Python API and it supports Articles.
Off-the-shelf Connectors
In addition to the FTML connector, Fluid Topics now features two additional ready to use, off the shelf connectors:
- Salesforce Service, to load and index knowledge objects (Solutions, Cases)
- Confluence, to load and index wiki pages
These connectors are (of course) fully customizable.
For more information, check the release note
Please give this new version a spin
and let us know what you think.
If you want to know the roadmap and participate to the choices of the next features, feel free to contact us.
We develop Fluid Topics for you.
