Sharing Skins Among Projects

[SDilg]

Hello,

Having searched through the forums I've come across one or two references to sharing skins among projects using external resources.
How would this be done if at least two elements (possibly more) of the skin must change from project to project? Namely:

• Caption (on the General tab)
• Logo (under the ToolbarItem style on the Styles tab)

There are about 9 projects in all that "could" share the same skin except for these elements. Maybe the solution will involve Conditions...? Although I've not heard about an ability to set conditions across-projects. All projects make use of Condition tags and Variables, but Variable sets differ slightly among projects and Condition sets vary widely.


Any insight is appreciated!

Thank you,

SDilg

[wclass]

We have come across the Caption issue, but have no need to change logos across projects.
So far, our solution is to manually update the Caption for each project - the original skin contains a generic Caption. This is not really a good solution!

Some time ago I put in a request for the Caption to be part of the target so that we could easily share skins, but I've not heard any more - time to resubmit. Even within a project sometimes I'd like to have different captions for different output/targets while re-using the skins.

Requests can go here: https://www.madcapsoftware.com/bugs/submit.aspx

[NorthEast]

You can't apply conditions to elements inside the skin, so I'm not aware that you can do this with Flare.
As suggested, put in a feature request if there's something you'd like to see.


Perhaps also think whether you actually need to differentiate your skin for each help output. It will mean that any future changes must be made in multiple skins, and introduce more potential for errors.

We just use a single skin. It means we have the same generic title for all outputs, but the title is only really an issue if the user has multiple help windows open at the same time and needs to tell the difference. We don't use a logo as we didn't think it was of any real benefit to the user; it's not like they need reminding of your company name.

[SDilg]

Thanks to both of you for your input!
Wclass, I did put in an enhancement request. Your idea of including the Caption in the target makes sense to me so I said the same thing you did.

Dave, I understand where you are coming from. I think each company's situation is unique. Here we have a lot of product lines. Each product is unique and has its own name and logo. Some of our product lines are private labeled so the user may see their own company's logo instead of ours....or a 'hybrid' logo which blends the two. Kind of complicated!

But thinking about re-using skins, may I ask you both a question? I use the Caption for two things:

• Product Name
• Release Version

...because I like the customer, as well as our Support and QA departments to be able to see at-a-glance the version of help they are looking at without having to dig or scroll down anywhere. Where do you typically put this information?

I suppose I could make the help skin caption 'Online Help' and add the version to the label for the First/Welcome topic of the TOC ("Welcome to [Product] Version [X]").
The logos are a different issue but not all products require a logo in the help so there is some flexibility there.

Thanks again and please let me know about the version numbers and if you have any other ideas!

SDilg

[NorthEast]

Yeah, I understand the need for branding; we include logos and branding on the welcome/start topic, and customise this for targets using conditions. We just didn't use the skin logo as we felt it offered no real functional benefit as a toolbar icon.

As our help is supplied with an application, our QA/testers and support teams report issues with the help against the product build version; so we don't actually need to display separate version information for the help.

We do include a single topic in the help that contains information and the build date; this is just for internal use to identify the help build supplied with the product build, and is hidden in the output (it has no links, and is excluded from the search).

If you wanted to include version information in the help (apart from the logo), adding it to the welcome/start topic is probably a good place. You could also include it as part of the master page if you want to add it to every topic. Perhaps be careful not to include too much though in case it clutters up the appearance of your topics; e.g. the large footer in Flare's help includes a bit too much unnecessary information.

[SDilg]

Thank you Dave,

I think the Welcome topic is my best bet, for versions. We'll see how that works! I agree with you about keeping Master Page headers and footers small - and have been successful so far on that front!

I like your idea of the hidden file as well. I would not have thought of that!

Thanks again for all of your valuable input!

SDilg

[Richard Ferrell]

IT is possible to have a project open with a different skin, you could use a CSH call to open the different skin.