Process for updating a single page in webhelp?

[stephencavers]

Currently my company publishes our software product's user manual on a per-release cycle. That is, between each software release, we update the help topics to reflect the new and changed functionality, send it for a review cycle, then publish the whole thing on release day. Our goal is to start publishing incremental changes, such as updating a single page of the webhelp without publishing any of the other in-progress or unreviewed content.

I've looked at using conditional text to hide new content until it's approved, but that seems to lead to horribly complicated content tagging schemes. Example:

1. Tag old paragraph as "PendingRemoval" and add new text that's tagged "PendingApproval".

2. On approval of new text, delete PendingRemoval text (or tag it "Removed"), then untag "PendingApproval" text.

While this may work in a clumsy way, it's messy and I don't know of a way to reliably search for content by condition tag. So once I have a large amount of tagged text, I don't know how to find it again to re-tag it appropriately.

Is conditional text my only choice here, or is there a known process for updating a single page in webhelp without publishing the rest of the changed content?

[NorthEast]

If you're using conditions, you can use reports to find the topics that contain conditions.

For your workflow, you may be able to use Track changes (in v7); using this, marked changes aren't included in the output until you accept the change.

One huge drawback I find with this feature though is that you can't generate an output that contains marked changes that haven't yet been accepted; meaning you can't build versions with/without the changes, or even simply just see a preview of your changes. So if you need to be able to build outputs with and without the changes, then you can only do that using conditions.

[stephencavers]

If you're using conditions, you can use reports to find the topics that contain conditions.

Thanks. I didn't know about this, so I'll take a look. Wouldn't it be a wonderful feature if "Find in Files" let you specify conditional text?

For your workflow, you may be able to use Track changes (in v7); using this, marked changes aren't included in the output until you accept the change.

One huge drawback I find with this feature though is that you can't generate an output that contains marked changes that haven't yet been accepted; meaning you can't build versions with/without the changes, or even simply just see a preview of your changes. So if you need to be able to build outputs with and without the changes, then you can only do that using conditions.

That's possibly the biggest reason why we don't use the Track Changes feature. It would be nice to produce output with unapproved changes. With the feature the way it is now, it's hard to include non-Flare users in the review cycle if they're unable/unwilling to use a Madcap product.